== Quote from Walter Bright ([email protected])'s article > Jeff Nowakowski wrote: > > On 10/31/2010 06:30 PM, Walter Bright wrote: > >> > >> Yes, and GDC and LDC are 100% GPL. > > > > That's nice, except that neither are suitable as a replacement for your > > proprietary D2 compiler, which is the reference compiler and where all > > the bleeding edge work is done. > > > > So strong statements like "D is fully open source" are misleading. > > The > > open source compilers are always playing catch-up, and the people that > > could be helping you out on the compiler are instead replicating your > > efforts. > I don't agree. There's very little, almost no, D specific support in the dmd > back end. It's a C compiler back end. Nearly all the work is done in the front > end, which should be little more than a cut & paste job for LDC and GDC once > they are already up and running with the front end. > The bugfix patches are nearly all tagged with specific updates to the source, > so > any one critical patch can be easily applied. > There are 3 D compilers, 2.5 of which are GPL, and the source is available for > the rest.
That reminds me: What is the actual status of LDC2? According to the somewhat outdated-looking LDC wiki, it's highly unstable. According to http://bitbucket.org/prokhin_alexey/ldc2 serious progress is being made. Is it in a completely useless state? An alpha state? A beta state? In the bigger picture, the only usable D2 implementation is DMD. This isn't so bad, as non-reference implementations always take awhile to catch up. Jython, for example, is still back on Python 2.5. However, it would be nice if there were multiple *usable* implementations of D2.
