On 9 August 2015 at 11:07, Johannes Pfau via Digitalmars-d < [email protected]> wrote:
> Am Sun, 9 Aug 2015 00:32:00 -0700 > schrieb Walter Bright <[email protected]>: > > > On 8/8/2015 11:36 PM, Tofu Ninja wrote: > > > On Sunday, 9 August 2015 at 05:18:33 UTC, rsw0x wrote: > > >> dmd not being deprecated continues the cycle of gdc/ldc lagging > > >> versions behind and being understaffed in manpower. > > > > > > I think another point to look at is how far gdc and ldc have come > > > while still having so few people working on them. Clearly they are > > > able to get more done faster because they can leverage the work of > > > the llvm and gcc devs. Seems silly that the majority of our talent > > > is focused on dmd when it is the slowest of the bunch. D's "not > > > made here" syndrome strikes again! > > > > There's pretty much no talent focused on the dmd back end. I do most > > of the (very) occasional bug fixes, and sometimes Martin or Daniel > > correct something, and that's about it. > > > > The idea that it is sucking up resources is incorrect. > > > > The DMD devs aren't working on the backend, but the GDC and LDC are > neither ;-) He's talking about the glue layer. > > DMD has the advantage that whenever a frontend pull request requires > glue layer changes you get at and once by the contributor. But for > LDC and GDC the glue layer changes have to be implemented by GDC/LDC > devs. > I think that is more of a problem with length of development + number of contributors/changes. For instance, when it was just Walter committing changes, the number of "fixed" bugs was of a reasonable number such that I could have gone through them all and tested them within a day (this is back when the D2 testsuite was private and I had no way other way to track whether or not codegen changes were required). Now we have the testsuite, which seems to be a good enough gauge for finding problems. However if there's been a change (eg: refactor) between what codegen is lowered in the frontend vs. glue, then it becomes a commit hunt trawling through thousands of changes to work out which one is relevant to the new wrong-code-on-previously-working test. One day turns into a week, turns into a month, turns into half a year. Iain.
