Luca's meaningless thoughts  

My original plan was to use GDC as my compiler of choice. This was mainly because DMD is not free and there is a chance that I need to put my hands in the compiler guts.

This was one or two years ago, now the situation has changed a lot. GDC is dead (there was no activity for a long time, and this added to the fact that GCC hacking is hard, it pretty much removes GDC from the scene for me).

OTOH, DMD now provides full source code of the back-end (the front-end was released under the GPL/Artistic licence long ago), but the license is really unclear about what can you do with it. Most of the license mostly tell you how you can never, never, never sue Digital Mars, but about what you can actually do, it's says almost nothing:

The Software is copyrighted and comes with a single user license, and may
not be redistributed. If you wish to obtain a redistribution license,
please contact Digital Mars.

You can't redistribute it, that's for sure. It says nothing about modifications. Anyways, I don't think Walter Bright mind to give me permission to modify it and use it for my personal project, but I prefer to have a software with a better license to work with (and I never was a big fan of Walter's coding either, so =P).

Fortunately there is a new alternative now: LDC. You should know by now that LDC is the DMD front-end code glued to the LLVM back-end, that there is an alpha release (with much of the main functionality finished), that it's completely FLOSS and that it's moving fast and getting better every day (a new release is coming soon too).

I didn't play with LLVM so far, but all I hear about it is that's a nice, easy to learn and work, compiler framework that is widely used, and getting better and better very fast too.

To build LDC just follow the nice instructions (I'm using Debian so I just had to aptitude install cmake cmake-curses-gui llvm-dev libconfig++6-dev mercurial and go directly to the LDC specific part). Now I just have to learn a little about Mercurial (coming from GIT it shouldn't be too hard), and maybe a little about LLVM and I'm good to go.

So LDC is my compiler of choice now. And it should be yours too =)

I've been monitoring and saving interesting (GC related mostly) posts from the D newsgroups. I saved all in a plain text file until today that I decided to add them to a page.

Please feel free to add any missing post that include interesting GC-related discussions.

Thanks!