Leandro Lucarella wrote:
Walter Bright, el 2 de diciembre a las 13:29 me escribiste:
I'd like to compare the user base and calculate the bugs/users ratio.
I guess GCC's would be orders of magnitude smaller.
And BTW, GCC implements 7 languages (at least 7 languages are present as
bugzilla components: ada, c, c++, fortran, java, objc and objc++), so
doing a rough estimative, 5442/7 ~= 800, less than DMD, which implements
only D.
Seriously Walter, you *can't* possibly compare DMD with GCC, it's almost
funny when you do it =P
My post was in response to the bug *count* being a showstopper. My
point is it's absurd, because you can always slice the data to mean
whatever you want it to mean. For example, many of the "bugs" in the
dmd list are enhancement requests, bugs in the library (not the
compiler), bugs in the documentation (not the compiler), etc.
Sure, but your comparison with GCC just makes things more absurd, not
less. I completely agree with you that bug count (alone) is not a good
measure of compiler quality, I just don't agree with the GCC comparison
to prove it.
And I think DMD is far buggier than GCC, I just never came across a GCC
bug, and I hit several DMD bugs (and I use GCC much, *MUCH* more than
DMD). I think GCC being developed by hundreds of people is the big factor.
DMD is getting *FAR* better since you opened the code.
My original resistance to even having a public buglist is precisely
because people will merely count the number of issues and declare it
to be a "buggy" product.
No, I think people thinks DMD is buggy because if you code in D, you are
almost guaranteed to end up filling a bug report (or at least searching
for one and seeing it's already reported). That doesn't happen with GCC.
Again, fortunately, since you opened the DMD code, this is improving
fairly fast. I hope you can change the license some time, and you start
encouraging other people involvement more actively, so the number of
contributors to DMD keep growing.
Historically GCC has been extremely buggy. It has really made a
turnaround of reputation. What it was notorious for only seven years ago
was for bugs, incompatibilities, slow compilation, and generation of
slow code.
Andrei
