On Tuesday, 18 August 2015 at 20:24:31 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev
wrote:
On Tuesday, 18 August 2015 at 19:02:20 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 8/18/2015 5:37 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
IIRC, I have had three releases affected by
optimization/inlining DMD bugs (two
of Digger and one of RABCDAsm). These do not speak well for D
when end-users ask
me what the cause of the bug is, and I have to say "Yeah,
it's a bug in the
official D compiler".
Are they filed in bugzilla?
Yep, just search for wrong-code regressions. The specific bugs
in question have been fixed, but that doesn't change the
general problem.
I would like to add that fixing the regression does not make it
go away. Even though it's fixed in git, and even after the fix
ships with a new DMD release, there is still a D version out
there that has the bug, and that will never change until the end
of time. The consequence of this is that affected programs cannot
be built with certain versions of DMD (e.g. RABCDAsm's build tool
checks for the compiler bug and asks users to use another
compiler version or disable optimizations). This affects users
who get DMD by some other means than downloading it from
dlang.org themselves, e.g. via their OS package repository
(especially LTS OS release users).
Fixing regressions is not enough. We need to try harder to
prevent them from ending up in DMD releases at all.
