A possible future purpose for D1 [rant]

[Brad Roberts]

On 3/1/2010 11:43 PM, Fawzi Mohamed wrote:
> 
> 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

Why is exactly why there are beta releases.. to give people a chance to do
exactly those sorts of test builds.  If you want to be a part of the solution,
subscribe to the dmd-beta mailing list and test your applications.  Reported
regressions have a high chance of being fixed prior to release.  Expecting
walter to do all of that regression testing on un-reduced test cases is unrealistic.

This isn't a new topic, see the newsgroup history to periodic repeats of it.

Later,
Brad