On Wednesday, 1 June 2016 at 01:26:53 UTC, Eugene Wissner wrote:
On Tuesday, 31 May 2016 at 20:12:33 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
On Tue, 2016-05-31 at 10:09 +0000, Atila Neves via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
[…]
No, no, no, no. We had LDC be the default already on Arch
Linux for a while and it was a royal pain. I want to choose
to use LDC when and if I need performance. Otherwise, I want
my projects to compile as fast possible and be able to use
all the shiny new features.
So write a new backend for DMD the licence of which allows DMD
to be in Debian and Fedora.
LDC shouldn't be the default compiler to be included in Debian
or Fedora. Reference compiler and the default D compiler in a
particular distribution are two independent things.
Exactly. But since we can legally distribute DMD in e.g. Debian,
and DMD is the reference compiler, we will build software in
Debian with a compiler that upstream might not have tested.
Additionally, new people usually try out a language with the
default compiler found in their Linux distribution, and there is
a chance that the reference compiler and default free compiler
differ, which is just additional pain and plain weird in the
Linux world.
E.g. think of Python. Everyone uses and tests with CPython,
although there are other interpreters available. If CPython would
be non-free, distros would need to compile with a free compiler,
e.g. PyPy, which is potentially not feature complete, leading to
a split in the Python ecosystem between what the reference
compiler (CPython) does, and what people actually use in Linux
distributions (PyPy). Those compilers might use different
language versions, or have a different standard library or
runtime, making the issue worse.
Fortunately, CPython is completely free, so we don't really have
that issue ;-)
