State of the Compiler

[Chris Wright via Digitalmars-d]

On Tue, 01 Mar 2016 17:06:21 +0000, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

> Cant you lock DMD2.x to DMD2.70.x (back-porting bug fixes)?

Yes. If the build system uses dmd from $PATH, that would be pretty 
annoying. However, if the build system downloads and unpacks the correct 
dmd inside the build directory and uses that instead, that would work 
pretty well.

This would be a reasonable thing to add even if we're not going to allow 
dmd to depend on phobos. It lets people know what version of dmd should 
be able to compile the current dmd, defending against "it compiles on my 
machine" issues. It also prevents you from using newer language features 
in dmd before it's been officially determined that that's acceptable.

Backporting all bugfixes is a nontrivial cost. Backporting only as 
necessary isn't, and it's just as straightforward with this strategy as 
with copying phobos modules into dmd's source tree.