DMD's Released Source, Great Stuff!

[Nick Sabalausky]

I just wanted to say how nice it is having and working with the DMD source, 
and how nice the whole submission process (ie bugzilla) is.

A couple years ago, there were some things I wanted to try to do with GCC, 
but it was a nightmare. Took forever to figure out how to get things set up 
to properly compile the GCC sources (this was under windows). Then the 
actual build took hours per-attempt, and I had to do it a few times, because 
it kept running into problems mid-way through. Then when I was ready to try 
to make my changes, finding my way through the source was a like navigating 
the world's most devious maze while blindfolded and walking backwards. And 
the one thing I never did figure out was just how the heck the submission 
process worked. Best I could figure, part of it seemed to even involve "wait 
for the right month". I messed with it on and off for weeks before finally 
giving up.

So I was a bit put-off from attempting to build and contribute to compilers, 
and hadn't attempted to do anything with or even look at the DMD source 
since the before the backend's source was released, until now.

I finally got motivated to try to do a patch ('zilla #2567, FWIW), and, wow, 
it went smooth:

I downloaded DMC, made some very minor changes to the makefile (only because 
I seem to have another conflicting tool named "sc" in my path), successfully 
recompiled it, found the locations in the source I needed, changed a few 
lines, recompiled again, tested, it worked, attached a patch to bugzilla, 
and was done in no more than about a couple of hours. Wow!