D Language Foundation February 2023 Monthly Meeting

[Mike Parker]

On Monday, 27 February 2023 at 10:53:25 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

>
> An annoying bug he had run into before and recently encountered 
> again is that Phobos on Windows doesn't properly support long 
> paths. Windows has a special syntax for denoting long file 
> paths that go beyond its old `MAX_PATH` limit of 260 characters 
> (strings prefixed with `\\?\` are treated as long paths). This 
> prefix is not required by the MS linker, by LLD, or by DMD. 
> They handle it internally. Phobos doesn't. Where this is 
> showing up is with dub. It uses a hash for paths to compiler 
> output, and the hash takes up 64 characters of the 
> 260-character limit. It's a real PITA. In his case, the LDC 
> beta releases contain a `-beta-1` in the name, and with dub's 
> hashes, the length ends up just over the limit. So to test 
> things on Windows he has to fake the version just to make it 
> work.
>

Related to this, I just learned that a PR was recently merged 
into dub that shortens the build path names it generates:

https://github.com/dlang/dub/pull/2589