DMD now has colorized syntax highlighting in error messages

[Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Monday, 15 May 2017 at 14:31:20 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> I'm glad this sparks interest in improving the error message 
> display, this is good.

I've been meaning to do this for years... I want overload 
resolution and template constraints to tell which conditions were 
passed, failed, and short-circuited. Colorizing them in the 
output (green for pass, red for fail, default for 
short-circuited, for example) is one of the candidates ideas I 
have for concisely displaying that information to the user.

Problem is just that the compiler discards those details before 
it gets to the error message display and keeping it up the call 
chain is non-trivial (or did, last time I tried to implement it).


> One thing I have noticed while doing this is how unhelpful many 
> of the error messages are.

Indeed, D's error messages are awful and I'd prefer we all spend 
time improving this more than anything else: make overload and 
constraint messages readable. Make size errors tell index and 
length in all cases (compile and runtime). Make inferred 
attribute errors tell you where and why the inferrence didn't 
match expectations.

And yes, I've written about all this in bugzilla already.