new version

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> Walter Bright, el  2 de diciembre a las 13:29 me escribiste:
>>>> I'd like to compare the user base and calculate the bugs/users ratio.
>>>> I guess GCC's would be orders of magnitude smaller.
>>> And BTW, GCC implements 7 languages (at least 7 languages are present as
>>> bugzilla components: ada, c, c++, fortran, java, objc and objc++), so
>>> doing a rough estimative, 5442/7 ~= 800, less than DMD, which implements
>>> only D.
>>>
>>> Seriously Walter, you *can't* possibly compare DMD with GCC, it's almost
>>> funny when you do it =P
>>>
>> My post was in response to the bug *count* being a showstopper. My
>> point is it's absurd, because you can always slice the data to mean
>> whatever you want it to mean. For example, many of the "bugs" in the
>> dmd list are enhancement requests, bugs in the library (not the
>> compiler), bugs in the documentation (not the compiler), etc.
> 
> Sure, but your comparison with GCC just makes things more absurd, not
> less. I completely agree with you that bug count (alone) is not a good
> measure of compiler quality, I just don't agree with the GCC comparison
> to prove it.
> 
> And I think DMD is far buggier than GCC, I just never came across a GCC
> bug, and I hit several DMD bugs (and I use GCC much, *MUCH* more than
> DMD). I think GCC being developed by hundreds of people is the big factor.
> DMD is getting *FAR* better since you opened the code.
> 
>> My original resistance to even having a public buglist is precisely
>> because people will merely count the number of issues and declare it
>> to be a "buggy" product.
> 
> No, I think people thinks DMD is buggy because if you code in D, you are
> almost guaranteed to end up filling a bug report (or at least searching
> for one and seeing it's already reported). That doesn't happen with GCC.
> Again, fortunately, since you opened the DMD code, this is improving
> fairly fast. I hope you can change the license some time, and you start
> encouraging other people involvement more actively, so the number of
> contributors to DMD keep growing.
> 

Historically GCC has been extremely buggy. It has really made a 
turnaround of reputation. What it was notorious for only seven years ago 
was for bugs, incompatibilities, slow compilation, and generation of 
slow code.

Andrei