DMD 1.031 and 2.015 releases

[Jarrett Billingsley]

"Walter Bright" <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:g3bqmi$2117$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
>> But you didn't sign up to be a compiler writer because it was easy, did 
>> you?
>
> If this was the last issue left, then I'd work on it. But there are other, 
> far more important, things to be working on.

You always discount forward reference bugs as less important than other 
things.  What other things *are* there that are so much more important?  New 
features in D2?  New features in D2 don't help me much when I run into the 
umpteenth forward reference bug in D1 that's completely un-workaround-able. 
New features in D2 don't help me when I have to cram every line of my 
library into a single module because DMD can't figure out what to do with an 
enum nested in a struct in another module.  Or when DMD can't figure out how 
to instantiate a template declared later in the file.  Or any of the other 
twenty-three unresolved forward reference issues in Bugzilla, including two 
regressions: http://tinyurl.com/3vg6jy

>> And if something like this _is_ too much work for one man -- why not put 
>> the DMDFE source on dsource and start accepting help on things like this?
>
> Reorganizing the internals of the compiler is not just accepting a patch.
>
> I've incorporated many user patches to dmd. The source doesn't need to be 
> on dsource for that.

I'm not suggesting patches.  I'm suggesting that you not be the *only* 
person working on DMDFE.  I'm also suggesting that if the internals need to 
be reorganized to implement forward reference resolution -- so be it.  Maybe 
the compiler needs to be rewritten.  It's been in development an awfully 
long time and D has changed considerably since development started.  The 
semantic analysis that used to cut it when it wasn't much more complex than 
Java might not be working for us anymore.