DMD beta
by Leandro Lucarella on 2010- 01- 28 00:01 (updated on 2010- 01- 28 00:01)- with 2 comment(s)
After some discussion [*] in the D newsgroup about the value of having release candidates for DMD (due to the high number of regressions introduced in new versions mostly), Walter agreed to make public what he called beta versions of the compiler, which he sent privately to people who asked for them (like some Tango developers).
The new DMD betas are announced in a special mailing list (available through Gmane too). It seems like Walter want to keep the beta releases with some kind of secrecy, or only for people really interested on them (the zip files are even password protected! But the password is announced in a public mailing list, that doesn't make much sense =/). I think he should encourage people to try them as much as possible instead, but one step at the time, at least now people have a way to test the compiler before it's released.
I can say without fear that the experience has been very successful already, even when there is no DMD release yet that came from a beta pre-release, you can see in the beta mailing list that multiple regressions have been discovered and fixed because this new beta releases. I think the reliability of the compiler has been increased already. Is really interesting to see how the quality of a product increases proportionally to the level of openness and the numbers of eyes doing peer review.
The new DMD release should be published very soon, as all the regressions seems to be fixed now and big projects like Tango, GtkD and QTD compiles (a lot of focus on fixing bugs that prevented the later to compile has been put into this release, specially from Rainer Schuetze, who submitted a lot of patches).
So kudos for a new era in D, I think this is another big milestone for having a reliable compiler.
| [*] | I'm sure there was previos requests for having release candidates, I know I asked for it, but I can't find the threads in the archives =) |
Comment #0
by Some guy on 2010-01-28 17:10This is good news.
It's just frustrating how difficult it is sometimes to convince Walter that openness is good. Once he's finally convinced to make a change, seems he usually comes back later and says something like "it's truly amazing how beneficial this change has been". But of course it's not amazing at all. It's quite expected for anyone who has participated in any open source project at all. These are the kind of changes you would hope the leader of a project would be making on his own, rather than resisting until the proponents are blue in the face from shouting about it. Resisting requests for new language features is good. Resisting requests for process improvements is self-defeating. Seriously, long ago Walter should have picked some wildly successful open source project (Python and Ruby come to mind) and just duplicated their process.