Note from a donor

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, October 28, 2017 02:50:39 codephantom via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 October 2017 at 01:08:57 UTC, Mengu wrote:
> > looks like d has a long way to go on freebsd as well.
>
> I've had no issues with D in FreeBSD at all...
>
> ...and it's been a really smooth transition to D...so far...
>
> I have D, Postgresql, and static C/C++ bindings working just
> fine...and that's really all I need..for now.
>
> btw. The FreeBSD platform isn't even mentioned here:
>
> https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-platforms
>
> So I'm just glad it works at all..otherwise I'd have to choose
> between not using D, or using another platform...and neither
> choice is appealing.

FreeBSD generally works well, but it hasn't generally been handled quite as
well as Linux - in part because of the auto-tester, and in part because a
lot fewer people around here use FreeBSD.

I've sometimes had problems, because the autotester currently uses FreeBSD
8.4 (IIRC), and so breakage on recent versions of FreeBSD aren't always
caught (though we're working towards getting the autotesters updated - there
are a few tests that currently fail with newer versions of FreeBSD but not
many). 32-bit in particular has more problems, since I think that most of us
who do use FreeBSD are running the 64-bit version, so some of the problems
weren't caught until Brad tried to upgrade the auto-tester.

Things are made worse for me by the fact that I run TrueOS, which is
essentially a vetted snapshot of the development version of FreeBSD, so
things break from time to time. At the moment, I'm hoping that

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17596

gets sorted out before December, since the next update for the TrueOS stable
branch is coming out then, and I expect that it will have the inode64
changes, which breaks dmd and pretty much any D program that deals with
files. However, anyone running FreeBSD 11.x is in for a much smoother ride,
and the fact that a few of us use TrueOS or FreeBSD CURRENT allows such
problems to be caught before it becomes a problem for the release versions
of FreeBSD. Getting the auto-tester updated will definitely help though.

- Jonathan M Davis