Finalizing D2

[Frits van Bommel]

Brad Roberts wrote:
> Don wrote:
>> bearophile wrote:
>>> Andrei Alexandrescu:
>>>> there's been a sharp increase in bug reports and patches recently.
>>>> Walter and I are still scratching our head over that (it's not like
>>>> dmd got much crappier overnight). I can only infer that more people
>>>> have started using more of D.
>>> I think it's mostly a complex consequence of showing DMD source code.
>>> I have "predicted" this outcome in one post more than one year ago.
>> Yes. It's the simple fact that you can compile DMD out-of-the-box. In
>> fact, everyone who has downloaded DMD is "forced" to have a working copy
>> of the source code!
>> It's interesting to compare this with GDC, which, with the GNU license,
>> is a purer form of "free software". Yet, it's amazingly difficult to get
>> it to compile (I tried once, and failed).
>> It's not just about having source code "available".
> 
> I don't believe that to be the case.  That would explain why more _fixes_ are
> being provided (primarily thanks to your contributions), but not why there's
> been an increase in bug _filing_.

Trying to compile and run code with DMD is not the only way to find bugs in it.
Some bugs can be found by reading the source and seeing something that "doesn't 
look right".

Another contributing factor may be that LDC users have been running into some 
bugs caused by weird/buggy behavior of the frontend, prompting the LDC 
developers to patch it.
 From there, it's often a small step to port that patch to DMD, compile it, 
verify that it works, and submit it to bugzilla.
(That's for D1 issues only though, since LDC doesn't work with D2)