A possible future purpose for D1 [rant]

[Fawzi Mohamed]

On 2-mar-10, at 01:26, Walter Bright wrote:

> Fawzi Mohamed wrote:
>> Maybe I am painting the situation more dire than it is, but I sure  
>> got annoyed by it, and I hope that it will be rectified soon.
>> More than new language features D needs stable and efficient  
>> libraries, something that can come only if the compiler is stable  
>> enough, and at least for D1.0 that should be the case
>
> Regressions are caused by fixing bugs in the compiler while having  
> an inadequate test suite. The good news in this, is that every fixed  
> problem in bugzilla also winds up in the test suite, so it stays  
> fixed.

that s good, but maybe for a release one should also try to compile  
some of the largish projects that are done in D (even al older frozen  
version) to see if in larger codebases something comes up...
At least for D 1.0 on a fixed system the idea "if id did compile it  
should compile again" is something that could be considered.
You could ask people to make a script "setup my program" that does it  
with the dmd in the path.
This could be done for some releases (stable ones), yes bugs found  
this way are harder to isolate, but it could be worthwhile.

Fawzi