On 2012-05-10 04:09:28 +0000, "Era Scarecrow" <[email protected]> said:
On Thursday, 10 May 2012 at 03:40:54 UTC, Michaël Larouche wrote:
It's a crazy idea I know, but maybe we could, as a community, buy the
rights from Symantec. Blender was a close-source program originally
and the open-source community raised money to buy the source code from
the defunct company that made Blender.
I'd prefer to see LLVM used as the back end; mostly based on emerging
technologies and it's likely a bit cleaner than GNU.
When doing the DMD/Objective-C project[1], I was somewhat torn between
building it on top of LDC (LLVM) or directly within DMD. I chose the
second option because I wanted this to be later merged within the
reference compiler, and Walter has been supportive of that. But that
choice meant I could not reuse the code from LLVM/Clang for emitting
the Objective-C binaries (I had to build it from scratch), and it means
no ARM support (for iOS) until either DMD supports ARM or my changes
get somehow ported to LDC (which probably won't be that
straightforward).
For me, hacking the reference compiler is more work for initially less
results… and this might have contributed to things being currently
stalled. There is a big potential benefit to hacking the reference
implementation: it's easier to keep things in sync later. But if it
stalls initial development, there's no such benefit. Something tells me
that if I restart the project, it might very well be top of LLVM
instead of DMD, improvements to the reference compiler be damned.
In my opinion, the front end would gain much by being a standalone
library: same library could be used with separate glue code for each
backend. It'd also help to have a single druntime being shared between
all those. I can always dream…
[1]: http://michelf.com/projects/d-objc/
--
Michel Fortin
[email protected]
http://michelf.com/
