Vision document for H1 2018

[ag0aep6g]

On Monday, 12 March 2018 at 16:07:40 UTC, SealabJaster wrote:
> I wanted to try and add some colouring[2] to dmd's error 
> messages (sounds easy enough right?), so I have a quick look 
> and see all I need to do is add some backticks around certain 
> parts of the error message[3, as an example]. So I add my 
> backticks into one error I can easily trigger, build it using 
> my powershell script, and then all I see is that an exception 
> (I think it was actually a RangeError) was thrown, and the 
> stack trace was just a bunch of addresses without any text. (I 
> don't have that build of dmd.exe anymore, and most of dmd has 
> been colourised by now, so I can't get an accurate copy-paste 
> of what happened or try to reproduce it.)
>
> I decided "that's not supposed to happen", and tried to 
> colourise a few other error messages... but I got the exact 
> same result. I try to take an already coloursised error 
> message, copy and paste it to another file, and try again to no 
> avail.
>
> At that point I decided that it's probably yet another issue 
> with my build environment that I'll have to try an work out, 
> but if I can't even get something 'trivial' such as colouring 
> in messages working without frustration, then I can't be 
> bothered to put in any more effort with trying to do anything 
> else (I'd rather not be stuck only being able to do 
> documentation changes), since, at least in my experience, I'm 
> probably just too inexperienced, and I just keep hitting road 
> blocks and endless frustrations.

If all you did was adding backticks to error messages, you might 
have been hitting issue 18403 [1]. That bug caused Windows DMD to 
crash whenever it tried printing a colored error message. It's 
very possible that you did nothing wrong, and you just had bad 
luck.

When you can't make sense of something like that, posting here in 
the forum is often worthwhile (Learn or General, though; not 
Announce). It's still pretty common that newcomers find bugs. 
More experienced members of the community can help determine if 
you're hitting one. If it's not a bug, they can help fixing 
things on your end.


[1] https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18403