On 2011-09-28 15:48, Trass3r 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)
Why wouldn't it? LDC and GDC can use the frontend written in D.
..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.
I agree.
Unfortunately there is no such project yet.
Dil is quite nice, but it's D1 and GPL.
I think someone is slowly porting the lexer from DMD to D, which will be
included in Phobos. There where discussions about this some time ago.
I think that the right approach would be to have a modular frontend
written in D that can be used as a library, think Clang. Then DMD could
use this frontend and connect it with the DMC backend.
To get this frontend I think the DMD frontend needs to be ported to D
without much modification in the first step. DMD would then use the D
version of the frontend. When the complete frontend is ported and used
by DMD, then we could start refactoring the frontend to make it more
modular.
I think this is the most realistic approach. I don't think Walter would
just drop the DMD frontend and start with a new one, or use some other
frontend developed by someone else.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
