Mission-Critical systems

[tsbockman]

On Thursday, 18 March 2021 at 08:36:51 UTC, Petar Kirov 
[ZombineDev] wrote:
> On Wednesday, 17 March 2021 at 19:54:23 UTC, tsbockman wrote:
>> [..] Is there a separate GDC frontend change log somewhere 
>> that documents all differences of significance to the user 
>> versus the standard 2.076 frontend? [..]
>
> I suppose this is what you're looking for:
>
> Changelog for the current year:
> https://github.com/D-Programming-GDC/gcc/blob/master-ci/gcc/d/ChangeLog

Thanks, but I've seen that before. It's an internal development 
log, and does not describe how code changes translate into 
different user-facing behavior. So, in order to understand which 
additional issues are fixed in the current GDC frontend, I have 
to:

0) Filter all the irrelevant internal changes out of the log.
1) For each "Merge upstream dmd" line,
     a) Manually look up the relevant DMD commit (no links).
     b) Find the pull request that introduced that commit, since 
that's where most of the discussion is.
     c) Study the DMD pull request to figure out what issue, if 
any, it fixes.
     d) Read the discussion and study DMD's commit history to 
figure out whether *all* required changes have also been 
backported to GDC from other relevant DMD commits, which other 
changes may or may not even be mentioned in the DMD pull request 
discussion.

(1.d) is necessary even if I assume the GDC developers never make 
mistakes or miss anything, because the GDC changelog doesn't even 
claim to record issues fixed, but only upstream commits merged. 
An upstream commit may have been merged because it partially 
fixes some issue, and fully fixing the issue was considered 
infeasible with a 2.076 base. Or, it may have been merged without 
all prerequisites simply because backporting the fix is a work in 
progress.

TLDR; Translating that changelog into a list of issues *fixed* 
(not just affected) is time consuming and can only be done with 
confidence by someone who is an expert in the development 
history/process of both DMD and GDC.