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.
Well a new frontend would need to be a real community project anyway.
It's ok that Walter checks every patch cause experience shows there are
several ways to fix a bug.
But that just doesn't scale. Pull requests are piling up already.
We'd need more people that have proven to be valuable contributors like
Don to get direct access.
You are right that another compiler is pointless if it isn't as good as
dmd cause nobody would use it.
See dil, it has a complete lexer and parser, 31k LOC, but you can't use it
and it's rotting AFAIK.
It's only good for creating documentation and even that isn't perfect
since it's missing semantic analysis (i.e. auto isn't resolved etc).
But this example shows the path:
Imho a new frontend would need to focus on non-compiler applications
first, such as
- auto-completion etc. for IDEs
- rewriting tools
(- doc generation)
cause these don't require a full-blown semantic analysis and codegen.
And as soon as it matures it can also be used as a compiler.
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).
Yeah probably, but there won't be any D3 anytime soon cause it will take
long to properly implement D2.
