On Thursday, 10 May 2012 at 14:03:15 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
2. Walter does not want to "taint" his knowledge of compilers
with some
other backend that would potentially harm his ability to write
closed-source code for profit. He is very adamant about this.
That's what I would have answered as well, from what I recall
from previous discussions – but Walter, could we please get a
definite statement from you? As far as I recall, most of the time
a discussion of this topic came up so far, it went largely
without any comments by you, even though you are the only person
really qualified to answer any questions on this topic…
I think the only real solution is for someone to write a good
backend for
D from scratch, and then assign the appropriate rights to
Walter. I think
if Walter did it himself, it leaves dmd open to lawsuit from
the current
copyright holder of the backend, since Walter's knowledge is so
intertwined with that code.
What exactly would that buy us – I don't quite see how it would
allow Walter to work on it, compared to, say, LLVM or GCC. And I
don't buy the argument that Walter can't look at the source of
compilers not owned by him, because it supposedly might make him
vulnerable to copyright claims. Program optimization is a quite
well-researched topic, and besides, even if DMC was somehow
»tainted« by LLVM code, Walter would just have to add a
copyright note to the docs and could continue to distribute DMD
under his own terms – LLVM is BSD(-style) licensed.
Besides, writing another new backend just for D/DMD would be pure
madness in terms of resources required – even LLVM, which is
backed by a bunch of companies, has a hard time against GCC in
terms of optimization, let alone ICC (on x86).
David
