Is this a bug?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, September 13, 2011 15:34 Caligo wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 4:47 AM, Jonathan M Davis 
<jmdavisProg at gmx.com>wrote:
> > On Monday, September 12, 2011 23:15:19 Caligo wrote:
> > > On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 10:44 PM, Jonathan M Davis
> > 
> > <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>wrote:
> > > > On Monday, September 12, 2011 22:38:25 Caligo wrote:
> > > > > Great. So is it a known bug?
> > > > 
> > > > I don't know. You'd have to search bugzilla: d.puremagic.com/issues
> > > > 
> > > > - Jonathan M Davis
> > > 
> > > Searching bugzilla (horrible technology) is never fun for me, thx.
> > 
> > Most search technology sucks on some level. But regardless, if bugs
> > aren't reported, then they're not likely to be fixed. So, if you want to
> > ensure that
> > the bugs that you find get fixed, you need to report them, which for
> > better or
> > worse means using bugzilla.
> > 
> > - Jonathan M Davis
> 
> *sigh*
> I think you fail to understand my situation.
> 
> I don't know anything about D's internals and I know nothing about
> compilers and how they work. If I did, I wouldn't ask on
> digitalmars.D.learn. But, I'll go ahead and bug report this.
> 
> http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=6665

I don't know much about dmd's internals either. But given that you have an 
error that you can search for ('/Internal error: ../ztc/cg87.c 202'), it 
shouldn't be hard to at least see whether there's anything which is obviously 
the same. And if there isn't then, you report it. Understanding how dmd works 
isn't really necessary to reporting the bug, and worse case, you end up 
reporting a bug which has already been reported, which is better than the bug 
never getting reported.

Most bugs where the compiler gives an internal error or an assertion in the 
compiler gets triggered get fixed fairly quickly, and even if they don't, 
they're not the sort of bug that much of anyone outside of the dmd devs who is 
going to have any clue what's going on with the bug. So, it's probably not all 
that fruitful to inquire about that sort of bug on any of the newsgroups. For 
the most part, the dmd devs don't seem to pay attention to D.Learn, so even if 
they would recognize the issue, they wouldn't respond to it in D.Learn. The 
odds of them seeing it in D newsgroup are higher, but when it comes to bugs 
which are "internal errors" or assertions in the compiler, I'd suggest that 
you just do a cursory search in bugzilla and then report them.

Bugs which relate to the language's behavior are much more likely to be 
recognized by others in the newsgroups (including D.Learn), so asking about 
them can be fruitful, but internal compiler errors and assertions isn't the 
sort of thing that people outside of the dmd devs generally recognize.

- Jonathan M Davis