I saw many problems and bugs in DMD is due to it's C nature and would be gone, be it written on D. But since DMD can't switch to D at least because of LDC and GDC, the only way to name a D-written D front-end is to work on a parallel project. And having 2 parallel projects is absolutely pointless, because neither one will have enough manpower to quickly develop it and because there will be 2 unstable compilers instead of a single stable one. I guess Walter and co. could switch to D front-end only after all bugs of D2 are fixed and D2 reaches it's end point, beyond which it won't get enhanced further (probably this would be the start of a new D major version). So, I hope D3 will start developing in D itself (assuming, that D3 will ever come along, since no-one seems to want it to happen).
On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 5:48 PM, Trass3r <[email protected]> wrote: > Am 28.09.2011, 15:09 Uhr, schrieb Gor Gyolchanyan > <[email protected]>: > >> I know, this has been discussed earlier, but i don't quite understand >> the real reason why isn't DMD's front-end being written in D. >> Existing DDMD is pointless (and i think abandoned), because it's just >> a plain rewrite with the same C-style constructs and completely >> rewriting it to be a correct D code would mean being unable to get the >> bug-fixes on DMD. > > Yep, it's pointless cause it inherits all of dmd's quirks. > Rewriting most of ddmd to overcome dmd's design flaws would be overkill. > Also keeping in sync with dmd is hard since there is no way of auto-applying > patches. Everything has to be done by hand and believe me, it's not fun. > > I think dmd should keep going its way and provide a base.. > (remember that it also provides a base for gdc/ldc. If dmd switched to D > there would also be no updates for LDC and GDC anymore) > > ..for a future new frontend written from scratch in D with a proper design > that isn't restricted to a single application (i.e. compiler), > similar to Clang but properly implemented. Clang drifted away from its > goals, especially the "easily hackable" one. > > Unfortunately there is no such project yet. > Dil is quite nice, but it's D1 and GPL. >
