DMD 2.055 Crashing on Windows 7 x64 (So is my D program)

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:35:20 -0400, Mehrdad <wfunction at hotmail.com> wrote:

> On 9/26/2011 2:30 PM, Mehrdad wrote:
>> On 9/26/2011 1:51 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>> AHA!
>>>
>>> Yes, there is a bug in snn.lib regarding pipes.  And I fixed it,  
>>> waiting for Walter to incorporate it :)  I needed it for the new  
>>> std.process.
>>>
>>> What it comes down to is, DMC's FILE * implementation does not expect  
>>> some of the quirks of pipe HANDLEs.  For instance, if you open a FILE  
>>> * around a pipe handle, it still tries to do a seek on that handle,  
>>> and crashes.  Also, when the write end of a pipe is closed, reading  
>>> from the read end results in EPIPE from ReadFile, but this is  
>>> translated to EBADF by the runtime.  Therefore, FILE * sets an error  
>>> instead of EOF.
>>>
>>> Is the email address you have for this message correct?  If so, I can  
>>> send you a new version of snn.lib to try linking your code against (if  
>>> you are willing to go through these steps), to see if it fixes your  
>>> problem.
>>>
>>> Using the command line dmd to build should be sufficient (I think).
>>>
>>> -Steve
>> Thanks for the email.
>>
>> It seems like it still crashes from SciTE, though. :(
>> When I try debugging, I see it's doing so inside _close() which is  
>> /immediately/ above kernel32.dll!@BaseThreadInitThunk at 12()  -- in other  
>> words, it seems to be called directly from the entrypoint of the  
>> program, assuming it hasn't undergone optimizations. The error is:  
>> 0xC0000008: An invalid handle was specified.
>>
>> Is there any other place in which this can happen?
> Also, now that we're on the topic... this might or might not sound  
> silly, but why not just use msvcrt.dll (if not the whole library, at  
> least the I/O functions)? It's not like it introduces a new dependency  
> (it's already in every version of Windows) and it's also proven to work.  
> Not to mention that it reduces code size as well...

I think the reason Walter always gives is that dmd would then have to  
output COFF objects, whereas it currently outputs OMF.  OPTLINK also does  
not accept COFF objects.

I think a lot of people would very much welcome this change, but it's  
somewhat of an underwhelming change.  Instead of using DMC's runtime for C  
functions, you are using VC++'s runtime.  But who cares?  I want D's  
runtime to be better :)

I think the best path is weaning ourselves off of C dependencies.   
Starting with FILE *, which has a lot of limitations.  It's part of the  
reason I'm working on reworking std.stdio.

For example, with my version of std.stdio, you would never have this  
problem, because it deals with the HANDLE directly instead of through  
DMC's file descriptor layer.

-Steve