D (was: Quo vadis, GPC?)

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On 7/29/10, Prof Abimbola Olowofoyeku (The African Chief)
<chief at greatchief.plus.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-07-29 at 08:17 +0200, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
> [...]
>> But most importantly of all (IMHO), D doesn't seem very widespread.
>> Maybe this will change.
>
> This also raises an issue WRT cross-platform development. If you wish to
> compile your GPC code on another system, you would run into a dead end
> if that system does not have a D compiler. I would imagine that one
> would be much more likely to find a C++ compiler than a D compiler.

Right. DJGPP has no D compiler (LDC? GDC? I don't know what it's
called. Maybe there's two, I forget.) but does have C++ (now G++
4.4.4). This has allowed several big projects to (at one time) be
ported to DOS: p7zip, Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, paq8o8. And DOS is a
weak platform (esp. in developer and user support). So if C++ is
acceptable even there, that should give you hope! And OpenWatcom has
improved C++ a lot too lately.  ;-)

And speaking of D, a Befunge-98 interpreter (CCBI, by Mycology author)
was written in it, but he only provides compiles of Linux and
(grudgingly) Win32 and lacks something on one port due to a compiler
bug still not fixed after several years. (Ah, no Unefunge or Trefunge
support on Win32, boo freakin' hoo, heh.)
http://users.tkk.fi/~mniemenm/befunge/ccbi.html

So I can't run (even under HX) the Win32 compile in DOS, but I can
compile FBBI (C99) even though it's not technically as good (but
original/"official", heh). And note that this is the only D app I
knowingly use (and only barely, esp. since I have not bothered writing
much B98 code yet).

Frank, I would be curious what you think of Ada or Modula-2, esp.
since both of those have (official or unofficial) GCC support. And
there are already (weak) converters from Pascal to Ada, Oberon,
Modula-2, etc. (But no GNU Oberon, only OO2C.)