Ideas for students' summer projects

[Mike Franklin]

On Tuesday, 22 May 2018 at 16:27:05 UTC, Eduard Staniloiu wrote:

> Let the brainstorming begin!

Building and running the DMD test suite on vanilla Windows is a 
pain.  I never succeeded but it appears to require the user to 
first set up a posix environment and then battle environment 
configuration, and other vague dependencies such as whether you 
are building for 32-bit or 64-bit and whether Visual Studio 2017 
is installed.

I believe most contribute to D with a Linux development machine, 
but sometimes there are Windows-only issues that need to be 
solved.  For that we need to be able to build and test our 
changes on Windows without hassle.

I'd like to see the requirement for a posix environment lifted by 
porting all makefiles to D, so the same code (with appropriate 
`version`ing of course) could be used to compile and build dlang 
repositories on all platforms without a lot of environment setup 
and configuration.  All that would be required a recent D 
compiler in one's PATH.

See https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/8162 for some working 
moving in that direction.

Mike