Would be nice if compiler gave more information!

[DigitalDesigns]

On Friday, 15 June 2018 at 02:47:56 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Friday, June 15, 2018 02:31:49 DigitalDesigns via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> > I am getting the compiler to crash from a different problem 
>> > after I moved some files around. I have no idea where the 
>> > error is now.
>>
>> There was a module that was included that was crashing the 
>> compiler for some reason. When I removed it, which wasn't part 
>> of the original project the compiler didn't crash.
>>
>> So, this is either a bug in modules or something in the module 
>> that crashed.
>>
>> the two modules I removed were sumtype and openmethods... both 
>> public.
>
> Regardless of whether there's a bug in any of the modules that 
> you're using, the compiler should never crash. If it does, 
> there's a bug in the compiler.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

I know, but without having any type of feedback it becomes 
extremely difficult to find the code to figure out what is going 
on. I only was lucky to find the module issue relatively quickly 
because I just added a bunch of modules and it was working right 
before. If I would have not built the code right after or would 
have not tried to figure out what was going on then it would 
become a harder problem. Considering that some code I added 
before also asserted would have lead me to think it was related 
to that problem and not simply including a module.

So, it should be very important to have some type of info that 
connects the error to what the compiler was doing. With large 
problems it is not easy to reduce to a test case that shows the 
problem directly.

I think a debug build dmd would be the easiest way. It is built 
with the release version so they are identical... but it would 
help users to quickly help with compiler errors rather than 
having to go build the compiler themselves, etc.