4 ms·

> I believe the first time I landed on the website it was not published under an open source licence, which at the time was a deal breaker for me For the recor

by mhh__ 6y ago

> I believe the first time I landed on the website it was not published under an open source licence, which at the time was a deal breaker for me For the record, this was never really true. The backend of dmd (the "main" D compiler) was unfortunately not under the same licence as the rest of the compiler, but the code has always been available. The GNU and LLVM backends are both fully open source and are faster anyway.

JNRowe 6y ago
As someone who has had this conversation when trying to sell people on D a few times¹ it seems like an odd way to respond to it. When the licence text contained "the Software is copyrighted and comes with a single user license, and may not be redistributed"² then it hardly meets the expectations people have of Open Source. This must end up in the weeds on source available vs Open Source more often than it shuts it down? [And yes, I realise this comment is a perfect example of those weeds.] ¹ Although, I appreciate far less than either you, or especially WalterBright, have. ² https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/6680 https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/6680
- bachmeier 6y ago
  > it seems like an odd way to respond to it A better way to clarify it would be: There are three D compilers available. Two of them have always been fully open source. Parts of one were originally source available rather than open source, but that one is now 100% open source as well. The website failed to communicate this information properly at the time the author first tried D. The D website had, shall we say, uneven quality of communication back in the old days.
  - JNRowe 6y ago
    I've leaned on simply "yeah, but long since solved" when lunchtime chats were still a thing. It was the fastest way to shut down that branch in my experience. However, I do like your full and complete answer. It acknowledges the old situation and completely nullifies it. I'll steal your second paragraph for when coffee time returns to normal ;)
vips7L 6y ago
Picking a compiler backend is confusing as a new user. I remembering having questions like: is dmd going to produce a slower binary? Are gdc and ldc up to date with dmd?
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Is it confusing? Presumably most C++ programmers have an intuition at very least between gcc and clang? Given my role at the foundation I need more data on this so I'm not being facetious
  - vips7L 6y ago
    Maybe I'm the wrong target audience then. I'm a Java developer and I only dabble in writing some C with GCC or MSVC depending on my OS. The compiler page has a lot more details than I remember [0]. It says: For beginners you should use dmd, but the next sentence says that LDC/GDC produce substantially faster binaries. So why would I ever choose dmd? What are the trade offs? Compile time? What is substantial? And then when you scroll down it doesn't say what version of the D language spec is supported by each compiler, imagine getting started with LDC and then it only supports D 2.02, when dmd is up to D 2.12 or something. I guess for me there were a lot of questions to getting started. [0] https://wiki.dlang.org/Compilers https://wiki.dlang.org/Compilers
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      It is no different from picking across OpenJDK, OpenJ9, PTC, JamaicaVM, microEJ, ...
      - vips7L 6y ago
        A smart man knows OpenJDK is the only choice!
        pjmlp 6y ago
        Try to use it on real time bare metal scenarios.
cxr 6y ago
> this was never really true [...] the code has always been available The term the author used ("open source") has a specific meaning. Merely being able to see the source code is not sufficient.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  That's is true, but as I said the fully open source compilers are good, so even if the code was not legally open source de jure - you could still audit it, is what I meant.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
crazypython 6y ago
It is wholly open-source now.
memsom 6y ago
When I discovered D (pre 1.0) the compiler front end was open source, but the back end source was closed. I was surprised years later when I found it now more open. There was a compiler called DLI that even used the front end code and wrote a new backend that used nasm. I remember porting that to BeOS because none of the other opensource back ends were easily portable at the time.

by mhh__ 6y ago

JNRowe 6y ago

As someone who has had this conversation when trying to sell people on D a few times¹ it seems like an odd way to respond to it. When the licence text contained "the Software is copyrighted and comes with a single user license, and may not be redistributed"² then it hardly meets the expectations people have of Open Source. This must end up in the weeds on source available vs Open Source more often than it shuts it down? [And yes, I realise this comment is a perfect example of those weeds.] ¹ Although, I appreciate far less than either you, or especially WalterBright, have. ² https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/6680 https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/6680

bachmeier 6y ago
> it seems like an odd way to respond to it A better way to clarify it would be: There are three D compilers available. Two of them have always been fully open source. Parts of one were originally source available rather than open source, but that one is now 100% open source as well. The website failed to communicate this information properly at the time the author first tried D. The D website had, shall we say, uneven quality of communication back in the old days.
- JNRowe 6y ago
  I've leaned on simply "yeah, but long since solved" when lunchtime chats were still a thing. It was the fastest way to shut down that branch in my experience. However, I do like your full and complete answer. It acknowledges the old situation and completely nullifies it. I'll steal your second paragraph for when coffee time returns to normal ;)

vips7L 6y ago

Picking a compiler backend is confusing as a new user. I remembering having questions like: is dmd going to produce a slower binary? Are gdc and ldc up to date with dmd?

mhh__ 6y ago
Is it confusing? Presumably most C++ programmers have an intuition at very least between gcc and clang? Given my role at the foundation I need more data on this so I'm not being facetious
- vips7L 6y ago
  Maybe I'm the wrong target audience then. I'm a Java developer and I only dabble in writing some C with GCC or MSVC depending on my OS. The compiler page has a lot more details than I remember [0]. It says: For beginners you should use dmd, but the next sentence says that LDC/GDC produce substantially faster binaries. So why would I ever choose dmd? What are the trade offs? Compile time? What is substantial? And then when you scroll down it doesn't say what version of the D language spec is supported by each compiler, imagine getting started with LDC and then it only supports D 2.02, when dmd is up to D 2.12 or something. I guess for me there were a lot of questions to getting started. [0] https://wiki.dlang.org/Compilers https://wiki.dlang.org/Compilers
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    It is no different from picking across OpenJDK, OpenJ9, PTC, JamaicaVM, microEJ, ...
    - vips7L 6y ago
      A smart man knows OpenJDK is the only choice!
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Try to use it on real time bare metal scenarios.

cxr 6y ago

> this was never really true [...] the code has always been available The term the author used ("open source") has a specific meaning. Merely being able to see the source code is not sufficient.

mhh__ 6y ago
That's is true, but as I said the fully open source compilers are good, so even if the code was not legally open source de jure - you could still audit it, is what I meant.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

crazypython 6y ago

It is wholly open-source now.

memsom 6y ago

When I discovered D (pre 1.0) the compiler front end was open source, but the back end source was closed. I was surprised years later when I found it now more open. There was a compiler called DLI that even used the front end code and wrote a new backend that used nasm. I remember porting that to BeOS because none of the other opensource back ends were easily portable at the time.