stability

[Bill Baxter]

Jason House wrote:
> 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)

I ran into plenty of bugs in MSVC back on versions 5 and 6.  7 and 8 at 
last finally seem to have gotten pretty decent.

--bb