On 10/05/12 00:53, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
But since that will never happen, it's a moot issue. It doesn't really matter
if we would have had 10 times as many people contributing (which I very much
doubt), Walter can't change the backend's license, so we're stuck with how
things are. There's really no point in arguing about how it affects us (be it
positively or negatively), since we can't do anything about it.
But gdc and ldc _do_ exist, so for the really picky people, there are fully
FOSS options. And as the front-end stabilizes, which backend you use should
matter less and less, so it should become less and less of an issue.
I don't understand why the project couldn't (or wouldn't) simply bless GDC or
LDC as the reference implementation. I do see why in the short term, as
finalizing/stabilizing the front end, runtime and development library are much
higher-priority goals, but in the longer term it seems like a viable possibility.
It also seems beneficial to do so given that GDC and LDC offer much better
possibilities for supporting architectures beyond x86/x86-64.
