Comments on: Compilers for the D programming language: DMD, GDC and LDC

By: JC

JC — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:26:46 +0000

At the moment, I have found GDC to have some major bugs with no time line for seeing them fixed. It is good to see another 64-bit compiler being actively worked on.
Thanks for your work. Can’t wait for a usable version.

By: Jascha Wetzel

Jascha Wetzel — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:50:36 +0000

Awesome! I love to see that you guys are still keeping it up! This is going to help D so much. The backend and the open nature of the project are very promising.

Although i’m rather idealistic about D, i had to refrain from using it for my last 2 larger projects. And this was all compiler related.
I believe that LLVMDC will make those worries go away.

I’ll help with OpenMP and CUDA extensions for my next project next year or so ;)

By: Long chang

Long chang — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:33:44 +0000

LLVMDC will be a great D programming language compiler.

By: Witold Baryluk

Witold Baryluk — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:29:13 +0000

@baxissimo everyone can just grab gdc sources and implement what they want, when it is working, dave will be happy to include this patches in mainline repository. In Debian and FreeBSD ports there are some patches for example, and they are slowly merged with Dave’s sources.

Compiler is big project and needs good knowledge of whole code and attention to some obscure special cases. Any way, DMD is reference implementation and anything which can go to GDC are curenly bug fixes. Noone (currently) wants to start next version of D language even for experiments because it will lead to chaos and compatibility issue. IMHO experiments whould be easier in LLVM infrastructure than in GDC.

PS. Some day there will be D compiler in D, but who knows when.

By: Jarrett

Jarrett — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:01:34 +0000

Wow, you got the exception handling in? Grats! I can’t wait to try this out.

By: baxissimo

baxissimo — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:57:46 +0000

“For me it was a combination of GCC’s daunting code base and the fact that there had been no activity for several months that stopped me from helping out.”

Actually I found that even if you post on digitalmars.D.gnu and say “I’d like to help. What can I do?” You get no answer.

Basically it seems Dave for some reason wants to keep GDC as his own one-man project, but at the same time he has no time for it. Oh well. So much for GDC.

Long live LLVMDC!

BTW, congrats on getting exceptions working, too.