The D ecosystem in Debian with free-as-in-freedom DMD

[Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d]

On 11 April 2017 at 20:13, David Nadlinger via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> On Monday, 10 April 2017 at 22:36:39 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
>>
>> All the regression fixes and none of the bugs!
>
>
> That's an interesting approach (spoken with British language sensibilities).
>
> Is anybody using GDC on a big "modern" D2 codebase (metaprogramming-heavy,
> …) right now? From my experience with Thrift, Weka, and so on, even
> regression fixes have a habit of breaking that sort of code in weird and
> wonderful ways. And that's not even mentioning other
> improvements/fixes/additions people might be relying on.
>
> Right now, the frontend version serves as a convenient aid for users to
> navigate those issues (apart, of course, from us trying to improve things by
> making semantic analysis more deterministic, etc). If something works on DMD
> 2.072.2, then users can also expect it to work on the corresponding LDC
> version as well. I'm not sure you are helping anybody by introducing another
> set of weird in-between versions.
>
>  — David

And DMD didn't help by switching codebase to D without first ironing
out all implementation regressions and interoperability.  Every
release between 2.069 and 2.074 is a broken release as far I'm
concerned.  The most recent is getting closer, but there are likely
still many things missing that need to be exposed to C++ (mostly
::create functions).