State of the Compiler

[Chris Wright via Digitalmars-d]

On Tue, 01 Mar 2016 07:00:43 +0000, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

> On Monday, 29 February 2016 at 23:25:45 UTC, Chris Wright wrote:
>> The second part is an argument against circular dependencies between
>> projects. Phobos depends only on system libraries, libcurl, druntime,
>> and dmd, and it's unlikely to add your project written in D as a new
>> dependency.
>>
>> I'm not sure how that translates to "never use phobos".
> 
> It translates to the same thing for any major project as it does for the
> compiler. If phobos isn't stable enough for the compiler,
> then it isn't stable enough for any major project.
> 
> All we need is a stable release, lock the compiler development to that
> release (add a conditional check for it). For archival purposes all that
> is needed is to ensure that the executable image of this stable release
> can be run in an x86 emulator.

In other words, in mars.d we add:
  static assert(__VERSION__ == 2068);
And occasionally we update that to something not bleeding edge. That's 
pretty extreme. Kinda hostile toward packagers and developers.

I'd set up continuous integration for each dmd release I want dmd to 
compile with, but that's just me.

Anyway, since dmd and phobos share a lot of top contributors and phobos 
tends to be an early adopter for new language features, they're often 
developed together. Plus they both have a lot more contributors than 
anything I've worked on outside a professional capacity. So we want 
either automated checking or a very simple rule. Walter went with a very 
simple rule. That doesn't protect from using newer language features, 
though, so you still need continuous integration. Less surface area for 
problems to crop up, though.