Digger can now build D versions from the future

[ponce]

On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 07:01:20 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev 
wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> It is my great pleasure to announce a new feature addition to 
> the tool Digger.
>
> Digger's goal is to be able to build D versions from any point 
> in D's history. As it has already conquered the present 
> (building D from git master) and past (building D from any git 
> commit), only one final frontier remained: the future!
>
> Although this might sound like an impossible feat which would 
> violate causality, recent advancements in D-wave quantum 
> tunnelling have made this possible and safe (mostly), and I've 
> put together a simple implementation.
>
> I've tried it out, and it works on my machine. However, due to 
> there being an infinite number of possible eventualities, user 
> input is required: whereas before only a timestamp or version 
> number sufficed, to utilise this feature the user must select 
> the desired features that their future D version must have, and 
> Digger shall locate a timeline where D has the selected 
> features, and tunnel it across, onto the user's hard drive.
>
> Here is what the user interface looks like (fragment):
> http://dump.thecybershadow.net/2d5de238000f1f933e9b9011678d7dc2/000000F0.png
>
> Note that due to technical reasons, Digger can only lock on to 
> timelines with additions proposed at the moment of tunnelling. 
> Nevertheless, these are exciting times! With this prescient 
> capability, we can find regressions before they end up in D, or 
> predict proposal conflicts before they materialise!
>
> If you'd like to give it a spin, the source repository is here:
>
> http://github.com/CyberShadow/Digger
>
> Pre-built Windows binaries are also available:
>
> http://dump.thecybershadow.net/c40ab2bcb1df22e4a7072cdf00341d18/digger-web.7z
>
> Launch digger-web to access the user interface!
>
> Further improvements can be expected in the near future, and 
> feedback is welcome as always. Dig safely!

Interesting!
This reminds me a lot of an application of prescient computing 
I've seen out of a MIT + NSA collaboration.
By simply reversing SHA-1 hashes from the future of a git 
changelog, they were able to guess the content of future commits.

Because of hash collisions multiplicity, user guidance was 
actually needed, but this was alleviated by the use of a longest 
common sub-string algorithm on all patch candidates (which is 
were I told them it would be way cleaner to write this with D 
ranges).