On Sunday, 4 September 2016 at 17:56:08 UTC, David Nadlinger
wrote:
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
I second this - sometimes you find it way too late: We had a
nasty problem few weeks ago where *only compiling with `-O`*
kept crashing a compiler on a assertion
(https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16225). And it was
several thousands lines worth of code spread across many modules.
What I find useful is enabling debug prints of dmd, compiling and
first concentration on the last mentioned module (I don't
remember if this was already there, or if I extended some
`writeln/printf`there). Then I approached it in the usual way -
binary removing/putting back chunks of code.
