local import hijacking

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Thu, 2016-01-14 at 21:36 +0000, tsbockman via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 
[…]
> The useless stack traces got fixed in a fairly recent version of 
> DMD - as have many, many other issues which are still present in 
> GDC, whose front end is several versions out-of-date.

"several versions behind" might be a better way if putting this. The
release cycles of DMD (basically unconstrained), LDC (basically
unconstrained), and GDC (heavily constrained), mean that "out of date"
is a bad marketing phrase. Especially…

> It is recommended to do your testing with DMD because of issues 
> like this, and mostly use GDC for making optimized release builds.

…given this. 

Clearly the D community needs to try and ensure that each GCC bundle
release has teh latest possible D in it, but we must also be positive
about which version each compiler supports.

> Alternately, if you don't want to mix two compilers like that, 
> LDC has good performance and is currently significantly more 
> up-to-date than GDC. Or, you could even just use DMD, as the 
> performance of its generated binaries has improved a whole lot in 
> the past two releases, although it is of course still not as good 
> as GDC or LDC in this respect.
> 
> More generally, though, much as we might not like to admit it, D2 
> is still beta quality software. It is *vastly* more stable and 
> less frustrating to work with than it was a few years ago when I 
> first tried it, but it still has a long way to go before compiler 
> problems cease to be a part of normal day-to-day usage.
> 
> If that's not acceptable to you or your business, you really 
> probably should just use something else and check back in five 
> years or so...

I find this the wrong view of progress, yet one that remains embedded
in far too many organizations. It comes in two parts:

1. If a product has changed at all in the last six months, other than
trivial bug fixes, it isn't stable enough to use in production.

2. Once we have stuff out in production, nothing may be changed until
end of life.

Clearly the opposite extreme of "we must use the very latest of every
early-access version we can get out hands on" is equally dangerous in
production. There is a middle ground. Keep everything as up to date
with formally released versions as possible, taking on a continuous
change and evolution strategy.

In this mindset D is certainly stable enough for production, it is not
beta software. DMD is the playground compiler, GDC the conservative but
solid one, and LDC the core production tool.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

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