Dear toolchain...

[Bill Baxter]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Simen Haugen <simen at norstat.no> wrote:
> I'm waist deep in problems, and have no idea how to get up.
>
> I have a program that uses d1, dmd, tango, ddbi, dwt and dwin. Some time ago
> I discovered that the program would no longer compile, and I have several
> features and bugfixes long overdue.
>
> It seems the problem happens during linking, but as I get no error what so
> ever it's a bit hard for me to track down. The project is about 30kloc.
>
> I've tried both dsss and rebuild. Dsss at least says rebuild exits with a
> status code 1, but still no hints on where the error might be.
> My guess is that this is a bug with lib.exe or link.exe, but I might be far
> off...
>
> I'm using D for several other programs, but don't keep a log for what
> versions I used when the projects last compiled... I've tried several
> different versions of both the compiler and the various libs, but as I said,
> I keep no log, so it's kind of a shot in the dark...
>
> I've spent at least 8 hours so far trying to locate the error with no luck.
> Does anyone have any good ideas how I can proceed?
> Or perhaps a pointer in the direction for narrowing down my search?

Some thoughts:
For the longest time DMD 1.037 was the most recent version that would
work for me and my DWT app.  So that might be a good version to try if
you haven't already.

One thing that bit me when I was trying to try out different compilers
-- the new directory layout is different, so you need to make sure
you're really using the compiler you think you're using.  If you set
up your path to have dmd/windows/bin on your path, but you install an
older compiler over top of an existing install, you'll still be using
the newer compiler because of your PATH setting.

Other than that, the only way to find these things is pretty much to
comment out chunks of your program until it compiles, and try to
narrow it down that way.

--bb