stability

[Jason House]

Bill Baxter wrote:

> Denton Cockburn wrote:
>> On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 10:16:08 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
>> 
>>> Denton Cockburn wrote:
>>>> [quoted text muted]
>>> D 1.0 regularly gets bug fixes with the focus on improving its
>>> stability.
>> 
>> I understand that, but there are still many outstanding bugs in D 1.0.
>> 2.0 now, which is in development, a lot of the changes affect things
>> elsewhere.  Are you going to correct all of those side-effects before
>> releasing 2.0? or are they going to be addressed during the development
>> of 3.0?
>> 
>> I was reading a thread on reddit a few days ago about issues people have
>> with their favourite language.  One of the issues with D was that people
>> were still running into compiler errors and bugs in what is
>> expected to be a systems programming language.
>> 
> 
> Seems irrelevant to me what kind of language D is.  Bugs are bugs and
> nobody likes 'em.  And compiler bugs are especially annoying.
> Regardless of the language.  Doesn't matter if it's a "systems
> programming language" or a LOGO interpreter.
> 
> I think Walter is doing a pretty good job of fixing bugs with D1, but
> still there are a few instances where he has seemed a little too eager
> to classify a fix as an enhancement, apparently so as to avoid having to
> port it to D1.  It's a balancing act, though.  Time spent fixing D1 bugs
> is time taken away from making D2 ready for prime-time.
> 
> --bb

Be that as it may, D is the _only_ language where I've hit bugs in the
fundamentals a programmer relies on...

...Ok, there was on exception in VC .NET where I had code that did x >> y. 
x was 32 bit and y could range between 0 and 32.  This translated directly
into an assembly call to the right shift operation.  The tricky thing is
that on that processor, the left shift operation only used 5 bits for the
shift amount.  Values of y were converted to y modulo 32, resulting in x
being preserved (instead of being zeroed) when right shifting 32 bits.  I
can totally understand that issue and wouldn't be surprised to see it pop
up in other compilers...

I'm not trying to say anything specific, but the issue that people have is
legitamite and relatively unique to D.  (I'm sure someone can come up with
an example from another language)