Is there any plans or work going on with a GCC frontend.
This way D would reach a bunch of platforms (even java bytecode)
and get some of the GCC developers invested work for free.

Thoughts?

	Jakob Kemi

The plan is to produce a "dfront" which will emit C code. Dfront will be open source, but will not be GPL. This will enable D on any platform with a decent C compiler, without all the issues that come with GPL.

Dfront will be the pioneer, like cfront was for C++. I hope that native implementations from a variety of sources, including a GPL one, will follow.

-Walter


"Jakob Kemi" <jakob.kemi@telia.com> wrote in message news:a6j78d$1lnm$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> Is there any plans or work going on with a GCC frontend.
> This way D would reach a bunch of platforms (even java bytecode)
> and get some of the GCC developers invested work for free.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Jakob Kemi

On Tue, 12 Mar 2002 00:39:11 +0100, Walter wrote:

> The plan is to produce a "dfront" which will emit C code. Dfront will be open source, but will not be GPL. This will enable D on any platform with a decent C compiler, without all the issues that come with GPL.
> 
> Dfront will be the pioneer, like cfront was for C++. I hope that native implementations from a variety of sources, including a GPL one, will follow.
> 
> -Walter

I'm sorry if this question has been asked already, since I'm new to
the list. How come you want an GPL version but you'll release your
version under some other "open source" license ?
Why not release it directly under GPL ?
Or perhaps under a dual license?

	Jakob

> 
> "Jakob Kemi" <jakob.kemi@telia.com> wrote in message news:a6j78d$1lnm$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>> Is there any plans or work going on with a GCC frontend. This way D would reach a bunch of platforms (even java bytecode) and get some of the GCC developers invested work for free.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Jakob Kemi

"Jakob Kemi" <jakob.kemi@telia.com> wrote in message news:a6jj2h$10v$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> I'm sorry if this question has been asked already, since I'm new to
> the list. How come you want an GPL version but you'll release your
> version under some other "open source" license ?
> Why not release it directly under GPL ?
> Or perhaps under a dual license?
>
> Jakob

Likely do a fork & dual license.

I'm disinterested in license issues, but would rather not use a GPL version (oddly because I'm NOT interested in license issues).  I think D is a compelling project, but the lack of source avaiable for even the win32 version kind of scares me out of investing too much time into D as an opensource developer and contributer.  I'd be interested in trying to spawn a project to create a D compiler and possibly a runtime environment.

Can you give me a bit more on the rationale to not release sources and involve other developers in the project?

-Andy

"andy" <acoliver@nc.rr.com> wrote in message news:a72ncr$8ag$1@digitaldaemon.com...

> I'm disinterested in license issues, but would rather not use a GPL version (oddly because I'm NOT interested in license issues).  I think D is a compelling project, but the lack of source avaiable for even the win32 version kind of scares me out of investing too much time into D as an opensource developer and contributer.  I'd be interested in trying to spawn a project to create a D compiler and possibly a runtime environment.

Walter says the sources will be available eventually... and Dfront
is definitely going to be open-sourced, so I wouldn't worry if I were
you. Anyhow, what's the problem with contribution? You get the compiler,
the docs, and complete source to the entire RTL, including the garbage
collector, for free - so what stops you from writing your own modules,
which might hopefully end being part of Phobos... =)

On Sun, 17 Mar 2002 14:14:39 -0500, Pavel Minayev wrote:


> "andy" <acoliver@nc.rr.com> wrote in message news:a72ncr$8ag$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> 
>> I'm disinterested in license issues, but would rather not use a GPL version (oddly because I'm NOT interested in license issues).  I think D is a compelling project, but the lack of source avaiable for even the win32 version kind of scares me out of investing too much time into D as an opensource developer and contributer.  I'd be interested in trying to spawn a project to create a D compiler and possibly a runtime environment.
> 
> Walter says the sources will be available eventually... and Dfront is definitely going to be open-sourced, so I wouldn't worry if I were you. Anyhow, what's the problem with contribution? You get the compiler, the docs, and complete source to the entire RTL, including the garbage collector, for free - so what stops you from writing your own modules, which might hopefully end being part of Phobos... =)

Well for starters, I don't have windows.  (I don't like crashing my system and I mostly do server side non-gui programming anyhow so I need a secure stable system.  Barely need a GUI.)

Yeah its the "eventually" that concerns me.  Its a "check in the mail"
kind of thing.  Personally, I think the success or failure of D may be based
on when/if the sources are released.  Would anyone object to the creation of
a seperate project for creating a free compiler for D?

Thanks,

Andy

"andy" <acoliver@nc.rr.com> wrote in message news:a72srh$c4l$1@digitaldaemon.com...

> Well for starters, I don't have windows.  (I don't like crashing my system and I mostly do server side non-gui programming anyhow so I need a secure stable system.  Barely need a GUI.)

Still, most people use Windows, so I guess making a compiler for Win32 is the right way.

> Yeah its the "eventually" that concerns me.  Its a "check in the mail" kind of thing.  Personally, I think the success or failure of D may be
based
> on when/if the sources are released.  Would anyone object to the creation
of
> a seperate project for creating a free compiler for D?

Don't you want to wait till Dfront is released? I guess it will be just what you want... and then, if it isn't, a separate project could be started.

Besides, the language is just too immature to separate implementations. Otherwise, we might end up with two hardly compatible compilers.

On Sun, 17 Mar 2002 16:36:13 -0500, Pavel Minayev wrote:

> "andy" <acoliver@nc.rr.com> wrote in message news:a72srh$c4l$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> 
>> Well for starters, I don't have windows.  (I don't like crashing my system and I mostly do server side non-gui programming anyhow so I need a secure stable system.  Barely need a GUI.)
> 
> Still, most people use Windows, so I guess making a compiler for Win32 is the right way.
> 

Not for heavy lifting.  It would have been better to start with a plugin for GCC or something of the such because it would have been available cross platform from the start.  I'm also fairly certain this could have been done around the GPL or so (as so far as I know C/C++ have not become "infected" by the GPL :-) by seperating things out properly.

>> Yeah its the "eventually" that concerns me.  Its a "check in the mail" kind of thing.  Personally, I think the success or failure of D may be
> based
>> on when/if the sources are released.  Would anyone object to the creation
> of
>> a seperate project for creating a free compiler for D?
> 
> Don't you want to wait till Dfront is released? I guess it will be just what you want... and then, if it isn't, a separate project could be started.
> 

Dfront doesn't excite me very much to be honest.

> Besides, the language is just too immature to separate implementations. Otherwise, we might end up with two hardly compatible compilers.

Agreed, I just can't see how this is going to work if boom one day there is a big 'D' from a little company.  You need either big muscle (IBM/MS/SUN/etc) backing 'D' or an opensource movement.  You've got the necessary codebase for a community of developers around it, why open it up now and let other developers help out?

In my view its the only way the thing will take at all.

-Andy

"andy" <acoliver@nc.rr.com> wrote in message news:a72ncr$8ag$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> I'm disinterested in license issues, but would rather not use a GPL
> version (oddly because I'm NOT interested in license issues).  I think D
> is a compelling project, but the lack of source avaiable for even the
> win32 version kind of scares me out of investing too much time into D as
> an opensource developer and contributer.  I'd be interested in trying to
> spawn a project to create a D compiler and possibly a runtime
> environment.
> Can you give me a bit more on the rationale to not release sources and
> involve other developers in the project?

The only reason I haven't done an open source version yet is because I felt it was so early in the project it would fork into fundamentally incompatible versions.

I understand that at some point D needs to go open source to be successful. Hooking it up to the GCC code generator would make it GPL'd, which I am uncomfortable with. Thus, the idea of a "dfront" which outputs C code. This would make D available on any platform with a C compiler.

What do you think?