DMD 1.018 and 2.002 releases

[Walter Bright]

Luís Marques wrote:
> Walter: have you considered keeping a large code base of D projects 
> which you would try to compile and run its unit tests before each 
> release? It would be a akin to dstress, with the added benefit that it 
> would check that major projects are OK with new versions.

I don't do that for several reasons:

1) Running the test suite is already an all night affair. Making it a 
week long affair makes it fairly unusable.

2) Trying to figure out why some large code base of code I am unfamiliar 
with fails is a major effort. It's not practical.

3) I find that people tend to program in "islands" of a particular 
language, no matter how large that program becomes, it only tests a 
particular "island" of features. So 99.9% of the large program becomes 
redundant as a test suite.

4) Nearly all bugs can be boiled down to 10 or less lines of code (even 
ones their submitter swears can't be reduced! <g>). Putting these into 
the test suite is highly effective. It gives me a very fast check, and 
since it is very small, when it fails it is a *lot* less work to figure 
out why.

5) The test suite is a gradual accretion of all those 10 liners. Over 
time, it gets extremely thorough. The one I have for C/C++ is a 
distillation of 25 years of bug reports, and the result is it is very 
rare for any regressions.

To sum up, I find it more useful to target with a rifle rather than 
carpet bombing!