OR in version conditional compilation

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, March 18, 2020 10:23:26 AM MDT IGotD- via Digitalmars-d-learn 
wrote:
> I have not seen any example where version has several OR matches.
>
> Example idiom:
>
> version(X86_64 || X86)
> {
>
> }
> else version(ARM || Thumb)
> {
>
> }...
>
> you get the idea. So is this possible at all or do you have to
> duplicate the code for each version identifier despite they are
> equal for many version identifiers?

To add to what the others have said, the reasons that Walter is against
having boolean conditions in version statements have to do with how using
boolean conditions in #ifdefs in C/C++ has historically been a big source of
bugs. So, disallowing it helps prevent certain classes of bugs. It's why
druntime duplicates most C declarations across platforms.

In general, I think that Walter's approach here is probably the right one,
but it can certainly be annoying in cases where you have to duplicate code
that actually is the same rather than being subtly different, and a lot of
people dislike it enough that they use workarounds like those discussed in
this thread.

And of course, some of the same bugs that come up with #ifdefs come up with
static ifs in generic code (particularly with range-based code that changes
what it's doing based on arange's type), but at least those can be found
with thorough tests on a single platform, whereas version-related bugs tend
to require that you run thorough tests on each platform.

- Jonathan M Davis