Want to help DMD bugfixing? Write a simple utility.

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday 19 March 2011 17:11:56 Don wrote:
> Here's the task:
> Given a .d source file, strip out all of the unittest {} blocks,
> including everything inside them.
> Strip out all comments as well.
> Print out the resulting file.
> 
> Motivation: Bug reports frequently come with very large test cases.
> Even ones which look small often import from Phobos.
> Reducing the test case is the first step in fixing the bug, and it's
> frequently ~30% of the total time required. Stripping out the unit tests
> is the most time-consuming and error-prone part of reducing the test case.
> 
> This should be a good task if you're relatively new to D but would like
> to do something really useful.

Unfortunately, to do that 100% correctly, you need to actually have a working D 
lexer (and possibly parser). You might be able to get something close enough to 
work in most cases, but it doesn't take all that much to throw off a basic 
implementation of this sort of thing if you don't lex/parse it with something 
which properly understands D.

- Jonathan M Davis