On Tuesday, 8 January 2013 at 21:57:17 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Tue, Jan 08, 2013 at 07:48:58PM +0100, Tim Krimm wrote:
Now that D 2.0 is fairly stable, are there any plans of
writing the
official DMD compiler with the D 2.0 language vs the present
language of C++?
DMD 2.0 would have to be feature frozen and then DMD 3.0 could
be
written with the previous DMD 2.0 compiler.
What are your thoughts?
Philosophically, I like this idea. D should eat its own dogfood
to prove
its own worth. :)
However, having the D compiler itself written in D, means we
will have
trouble bootstrapping it on new platforms. The advantage of
having a C++
implementation is that C/C++ compilers are almost the first
thing that
gets implemented on a new platform, so you can almost always
count on
their existence. So you can just compile DMD and away you go.
We *could* write a cross-compiler, of course, but it still
requires that
you first target the D compiler (written in D) to the new
platform, and
then cross-compile itself to that platform. Whereas with DMD,
you just
use the target platform's C++ compiler and you're up and
running.
T
I think the OP implied that we could build DMD2 from its C++
source on any platform and then DMD3 from its D source with DMD2.
