15 years later it's negative. The user experience of having to download and switch compilers (or even think about it at all) is terrible, especially given that (after performance) one of the main motivators of switching to ldc (i.e. all serious use of D to make money) is either a bug or lack of platform support in dmd.
Most importantly it results in a significantly increased workload for the maintainers, and spreads out effort over a bigger area.
So the most likely outcome is a language with multiple mediocre compilers, instead of one really good one that everyone works on.
Which is the exact opposite of what the intention behind this proposal is, which is to make the language more maintainable.
Ironically, when there was only one choice that was described as a big negative. Our experience with the troika has been a clear positive.
15 years later it's negative. The user experience of having to download and switch compilers (or even think about it at all) is terrible, especially given that (after performance) one of the main motivators of switching to ldc (i.e. all serious use of D to make money) is either a bug or lack of platform support in dmd.
Most importantly it results in a significantly increased workload for the maintainers, and spreads out effort over a bigger area. So the most likely outcome is a language with multiple mediocre compilers, instead of one really good one that everyone works on.
Which is the exact opposite of what the intention behind this proposal is, which is to make the language more maintainable.
LDC and GDC are both very good compilers.
Technologically D suffers more from having a single frontend implementation than having multiple backends.