Digital Mars Is Wanting To Merge D Into GCC

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Digital Mars Is Wanting To Merge D Into GCC

Walter Bright of Digital Mars has brought up with the GCC list what steps need to be traveled so that GDC, the GNU D Compiler, can be merged into GCC. Right now the GNU Compiler Collection doesn't have support for the D programming language, but that may soon change if this merge by Digital Mars is successful...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODc2Ng

[RahulSundaram]

"The design of the D programming language is largely influenced by C++. It was just recently with Fedora 14 that Red Hat pushed in a D compiler, but rather than using GDC, they used LDC"

Note that this feature was not actually pushed by Red Hat at all. It was entirely volunteer driven

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/D_Programming

Red Hat has no stake or interest in the effort afaik. It is important to recognize that Fedora is by and large driven by volunteers although Red Hat plays a key role as a sponsor.

[pipe13]

This is good news. I read Andrei Alexandrescu's "The D Programming Language" last month, and found it to be the first language I could personally get excited about since... C++. But anyone wishing to get started with D2 needn't wait on GCC 4.7: The GDC Project is alive and well; their D2 patch is simple, and builds just fine against GCC 4.4.x. (I tested on Fedora 12, The maintainer uses Ubuntu.)

[FunkyM]

I think a vital part to bring this great and powerful language to further adoption is the inclusion alongside GCC. Here comes some hope that it succeeds this time and does not again end on some copyright transfer issues. It's really looooong overdue.

[baryluk]

Nice

Very good move, especially that the not so long ago Go was merged into GCC mainstream, and there is no particular excuse why D should have similar treatment (after removing any licensing issues, which isn't big problem, this just need to be resolved). And Go and it's compilator are much more newer, than D1, which have already few years and multiple compilators, and is active project now for about 10 years.

I use D exclusivly everywhere I can for everything, and it is ubercool language, which every C programmer just should love due to it's simplicity and C cores, and elegante integration of multiple paradigms (imperative, object, functional, contract, testing, template, metaprograming, better portability, etc)

I mainly use dmd compiler with D2 language, but from time to time I use gdc and ldc for better optimization or when needing 64-bit support and portability testing. For few years gdc had no active maintainer, but AFAIK few months ago project was restarted and merged with newest changes and many bugs fixed.

One also should know that GDB 7.2 have full support for D, it's mangling mechanisms, object members access, and various array types that D uses.