D2 is really that stable as it is claimed to be?

[bearophile]

Walter Bright:

> I worry that this is too complicated to be worthwhile.

After seeing the error messages given by Clang I think it could 
be worthwhile. In C++ it has saved me debugging time.


> I used to do that, but again, it was a completely unwanted 
> feature, and I
> abandoned it.
> It's simple enough to grep for the error message text, and I 
> myself prefer
> to do the grep method.

At the moment in D learn people show the error messages generated 
by dmd and don't know what to do. An archive of errors, one error 
for each wiki page, is useful because the user sees a longer 
description of the error, plus two examples of it (where it could 
be recognized better if it's really the right error), plus 
explanations how to fix it, like to use "const" or "inout" or to 
use an alias inside a class etc.

The problem with grepping is that it could lead to mistakes, you 
have to grep for the whole error message, otherwise you risk 
finding the wrong message. Another problem is that the wording 
could change, both in different versions of the same compiler and 
in different compilers, so every compiler needs its own wiki. 
Also, if you need to use a search, you must have all the error 
messages in the same page, while with error messages you could 
just go directly to the page number and you don't need to copy 
and paste several (all) the words of the error message. Having a 
standard number across all D compilers allows for a 
standardization of tools (the IDE has to show the same error 
tooltips regardless the D compiler you are using). Another 
advantage of numbers of error messages is that if two different 
points of the same compiler have to generate the same error, 
using the same code number there is no risk the error message 
could go out of sync to each other. This has happened in DMD, 
where I have seen the same error give different error messages 
with the same dmd 
(http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=11094 ).


> What makes me grumpy is people only want these things when some 
> other
> compiler does it, sort of a bandwagon thing.

I have tried to show, here and in Issue 5004, that's not true. 
And even if it's just a fashion as you say, I could argue that in 
computer science and programming there are far worse fashions 
people cling to. Sometimes when you create an engineering product 
it's not enough for it to be technically very good, you also have 
to wrap it in a colourful, fashion-aware and pretty paper. If you 
miss doing that, you are doing 99% of the necessary work for 
success but you are missing far more than the 1% of "overall 
appreciation" for your product.

Bye,
bearophile