On Thursday, 28 February 2013 at 05:32:37 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
On 2/27/2013 8:03 PM, Marco Leise wrote:
There are > 1000 open bugs and well known, expected language
features not implemented. In my opinion, the compiler should
be ported after all important language features are finalized.
I don't mean syntax, but stuff that only bearophile has the
complete list of: shared, allocators, ...
Also DMD leaks memory -> it is tempting to use the GC -> DMD
will often be a whole lot slower in the end. :D
Also Phobos is designed for safety and generic programming,
not for raw speed like many old C functions (at least that's
my experience). E.g. I have seen or written Unicode and
float/string conversion routines that perform 7x to 13x faster
than the 'obvious' way in D.
The motivation for the migration is not for fun, it's not even
to "eat our own dogfood". The idea is to make the front end
more reliable and more flexible by using D features that help.
This should make us more productive and able to fix problems
faster and presumably have fewer problems in the first place.
There are a long list of D things that will help.
So you're saying some of our dogfood is actually caviar then...
I would divide the caviar into two groups, manifest and hidden.
The manifest caviar is the easiest to sell. Hidden caviar is the
benefits which are unexpected by at least a portion of the D
community. Each piece of hidden caviar therefore needs one or
more champions.
Not that this is a perfect example, but the lexer being assembled
by Brian and Dmitri seems to have a spark of the hidden caviar
about it, lending weight to the "clean room" camp. The politics
of "existing" versus "clean room" must be mastered because
there's a lot of room for resentment there if the wrong choices
are made, it seems to me.
One thing both "clean room" and "existing" have, or should have,
in common is the test suite, which is probably a better spec than
the spec is. Perhaps a method can be devised which makes it easy
to divide and conquer the test suite.
