dmd -o- option meaning changed recently? Now not creating OBJ but also not creating EXE

[Dicebot via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Sunday, 2 October 2016 at 21:05:25 UTC, A D dev wrote:
> One last point:
>
> If that was always the behavior (in all versions from 2010 - or 
> earlier), i.e. -o- generates neither .OBJ nor .EXE, then what 
> is the purpose of the option? does it act as just a syntax 
> check?

Purpose is to skip code generation and only do syntax/semantic 
validation. Very helpful when testing compiler because:

a) it takes less time speeding up overall test suite
b) doesn't require runtime static library to succeed, thus 
simplifying setup