Quality of errors in DMD

[David Nadlinger via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 3 September 2016 at 22:39:22 UTC, Walter Bright 
wrote:
> Because it's useless to anyone but the compiler devs, and it 
> adds cruft to the compiler. And even worse than useless, it 
> confuses the user into thinking it is a meaningful message.

This is short-sighted, for the reason I pointed out in my earlier 
post. How would you go about reporting an ICE for a 100k LOC test 
case without any idea about where to start looking?

In fact, that's precisely what happened to the guys at Weka 
before, although I'm certain they are not alone with this. They 
encountered ICEs when updating the compiler version with no way 
to narrow it down. Of course, *I* could just build DMD with 
symbols and have a look at what was going on in GDB, but that's 
the luxury of being a compiler dev.

> Let's not pretend the user can debug the compiler.

They can create bug reports to help other people to do so, though.

  — David