On Monday, 12 March 2018 at 16:07:40 UTC, SealabJaster wrote:
I wanted to try and add some colouring[2] to dmd's error
messages (sounds easy enough right?), so I have a quick look
and see all I need to do is add some backticks around certain
parts of the error message[3, as an example]. So I add my
backticks into one error I can easily trigger, build it using
my powershell script, and then all I see is that an exception
(I think it was actually a RangeError) was thrown, and the
stack trace was just a bunch of addresses without any text. (I
don't have that build of dmd.exe anymore, and most of dmd has
been colourised by now, so I can't get an accurate copy-paste
of what happened or try to reproduce it.)
I decided "that's not supposed to happen", and tried to
colourise a few other error messages... but I got the exact
same result. I try to take an already coloursised error
message, copy and paste it to another file, and try again to no
avail.
At that point I decided that it's probably yet another issue
with my build environment that I'll have to try an work out,
but if I can't even get something 'trivial' such as colouring
in messages working without frustration, then I can't be
bothered to put in any more effort with trying to do anything
else (I'd rather not be stuck only being able to do
documentation changes), since, at least in my experience, I'm
probably just too inexperienced, and I just keep hitting road
blocks and endless frustrations.
If all you did was adding backticks to error messages, you might
have been hitting issue 18403 [1]. That bug caused Windows DMD to
crash whenever it tried printing a colored error message. It's
very possible that you did nothing wrong, and you just had bad
luck.
When you can't make sense of something like that, posting here in
the forum is often worthwhile (Learn or General, though; not
Announce). It's still pretty common that newcomers find bugs.
More experienced members of the community can help determine if
you're hitting one. If it's not a bug, they can help fixing
things on your end.
[1] https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18403
