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by poppadom1982 76 days ago
Yeah dude but you've really marketed D poorly. I remember looking at D what must be 15 years back or so? And I loved the language and was blown away by its beauty and cool features. But having no FOSS compiler and the looming threat of someone claiming a patent (back then it was unclear that Mono/C# was "legal" and even Java hung in the balance) was too scary for me to touch it.

Now I'm old and I believe D has missed its opportunity. Kinda sad.
1 comments
WalterBright 76 days ago
D is 100% open source. The gnu D compiler and the LLVM D compiler were always 100% open source.
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WalterBright 76 days ago
I don't recall anyone making a patent claim.
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poppadom1982 75 days ago
Open source and free software isn't the same thing. Nobody made a claim on Java either, until someone did. I just distinctly remember explicitly not exploring D for that reason. Also this way way before LLVM and I also don't think GNU had a D compiler back then. There was only the (and I really believe it was closed source) Digital Mars compiler.
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WalterBright 75 days ago
15 years ago, both LLVM and GNU had a D compiler. gdc (the GNU compiler) was not an official part of the gcc collection, but it was definitely there and 100% open source.

All three compilers shared the open source D front end. The DMD backend source code was available for anyone to use, it just couldn't be redistributed. We were eventually able to fully Boost license it.

The DMD compiler always had source available for free from Digital Mars. I never sold a single copy :-)

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