Has anyone been successful using 64-bit release dmd on Windows?

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Wednesday, 13 June 2018 at 17:13:09 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
> After too many days of frustration to be able to count, I 
> finally discovered what works for our builds: the debug build 
> of 64-bit dmd on Windows.
>
> When I build the release version from the Makefile or use 
> digger, it produces a dmd binary that crashes randomly (bad 
> enough) or compiles executables which themselves crash or run 
> forever (much, much worse).

I've used 64-bit DMD exclusively while Windows was my primary OS, 
but that was a few years ago.

Do you have a way to reproduce these problems reliably? If so, a 
few things you could try to narrow down the problem:

- Use DustMite and a test script that compiles a program with 
64-bit release dmd.exe and a 32-bit or 64-bit debug dmd.exe, and 
accepts any reductions in which only the former crashes.

- See if this is a regression (do older 64-bit DMDs work OK?), 
and if so, use Digger to find where it was introduced.

- It's possible that the bug occurs not in the compiled DMD code, 
but in the host DMD compiler. There was at least one recorded 
case of a bug in the host DMD resulting in a broken built DMD 
which in turn executed successfully, but built broken programs. A 
discrepancy between which host DMD compiler is used can sometimes 
explain why some tests succeed on CI but fail locally, or vice 
versa.