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arunc

> The people who want to drag D into the Java/C# territory are the problem in my opinion

Absolutely and that's the majority of D community.

> took what C had to offer and put it to the next level

ImportC is a fantastic stuff that Walter is working on.

> simplify the language

Sane defaults, but the ship has sailed. Reminds me of a talk Scott Meyers gave a while ago "The last thing D needs (is to hire him)". I think it's time they hire him.

> compiler performance

Rather focus on just LDC or GDC and drop DMD altogether. DMD is a good piece of software, but for such a small community, I find it alarming that they waste human effort across 3 different compilers and still complain lack of resources.

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> ImportC is a fantastic stuff that Walter is working on.

I agree, it's one of the things that stands out when you decide to pick a system language: "how does it play with C? can i easily consume the ecosystem?"

> Rather focus on just LDC or GDC and drop DMD altogether. DMD is a good piece of software, but for such a small community, I find it alarming that they waste human effort across 3 different compilers and still complain lack of resources.

I disagree, there is value in having your own backend, DMD compiles so fast, it's a comparative advantage, they should never give that up

GDC/LDC are great because that allows D to be highly portable, even if they are slower to compile than DMD

Even Zig people decided to maintain their own self hosted backend for that reason, performance and independence

They learnt from D, a real language has its own backend, if you don't then you are just LLVM sugar

>> GDC/LDC are great because that allows D to be highly portable, even if they are slower to compile than DMD

So you'd use DMD for development because it compiles fast, and once debugging/testing/etc are completed, you build the "production release" using LDC/GDC?

Yup, many use that approach

LLVM sugar. Agreed indeed. Independence is good.

No problem with LLVM, but multiple implementations is healthy. And in any case I'd probably think it makes sense DMD came into existence alongside the idea of D first seeing Walter's experience (and well lack of LLVM back then).

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