WAWalterBright·Jul 24, 2018
"Use the Source, Luke!"
https://github.com/DigitalMars/Compiler/blob/master/dm/src/d...
In The internals of testing in Rust in 2018DigitalMars
Compiler
D2018–2025
DigitalMars / Compiler
Compiler
Discover this repository through its Hacker News conversations.
4Distinct people
17Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
337GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A public description has not been verified.
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- dlang/dmd · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:28:18 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year17 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-05-22 21:45:47 UTC to 2025-11-03 00:47:14 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesI forgot to add SROA to the list. DMD does a limited form of SROA I wrote as a proof of concept, it should be generalized.
https://github.com/DigitalMars/Compiler/blob/master/dm/src/d...
I've also written a loop unroller, but it can be improved:
https://github.com/DigitalMars/Compiler/blob/master/dm/src/d...
My evaluation was based on comparing the code gen output of the various compilers, not looking at how they were achieved.
As for SSA, DMD's optimizer is based on an intermediate representation that is a binary tree. A binary tree is a form of SSA - each operator node is a value assigned once and never modified.
> Respectfully
No worries. I'm used to people telling me I can't do things :-)
In The internals of testing in Rust in 2018Not really. The two main reasons LLVM and gcc do a better optimization job is they have a better function inliner and loop unroller. Neither are particularly computation intensive.
DMD does all the usual data flow analysis optimizations - strength reduction, copy propagation, loop unrolling, dead store elimination, live range analysis, etc.
https://github.com/DigitalMars/Compiler/blob/master/dm/src/d...
The optimizer / code generator is the same one that Digital Mars C++ uses, which was developed in the 1980's (!). Up until 2000 or so, the code generated was about the same as gcc, though DMC++ ran several times faster.
Since 2000, all my attention has been on the D front end, and so the optimizer wasn't getting the devoted attention it had earlier.
Just recently I finished converting the DMD optimizer from C to D, and am doing the code ge
Read the rest
nerator. This should make the code much more tractable.
I'm pretty clueless here, but from a quick search on GitHub it looks like there's support for NT exception handling, and DWARF exception handling. (I realise this doesn't really answer your question, but it's a start.)
https://github.com/DigitalMars/Compiler/blob/7a33233c/dm/src...
https://github.com/DigitalMars/Compiler/blob/7a33233c/dm/src...
In DigitalMars C/C++ CompilerApparently, the compiler is progressively rewritten in d. For those interested, there is a tag for the last pure c version: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Compiler/tree/Last-C-Version
Would probably be interesting to convert it in C++17 :-)
Meta-comment: I delete my previous comment by error and want to put it again, and didn't manage to do it again. Is there some anti-duplication code that prevent to write 2 times the same comment on HN?
In DigitalMars C/C++ Compiler