On 10/17/2012 06:37 PM, David Nadlinger wrote:
Well, that depends on your definition of stable. LDC Git master is supposed always pass the CI tests, i.e. the DMD, druntime and Phobos test suites.
Which would explain my (limited, as I haven't been doing any development recently) experience of it seeming very stable and effective when built (and rebuilt) from git sources. :-)
Have any optimization improvements landed recently? It really seems like since my last email on the subject, the speed of executables has improved to be about the same as GDC.
A possible extension of that would be to have a separate »stable« Git branch which is automatically advanced along with master by the CI system whenever a given revision passes all the tests. If somebody wants to set up a system like this, I'd be happy to officially adopt it.
That's not what I was really thinking about -- I trust you and the other LDC devs to make sure things pass all the automated tests before merging into master.
But in my experience, anything more than that, i.e. declaring revisions stable based on criteria which can't be evaluated by an automatic test suite, is not worth it, at least for smallish projects like LDC. Judging whether a given state is stable by hand is notoriously hard to get right, and the reason we have beta phases before releases, etc.
What I had in mind was that you might define a "stable" branch which is updated according to certain new-feature milestones, and which in the interim between those milestones only receives bugfixes, not new features.
I guess the benefits of doing this depend on the extent to which you have a well-defined roadmap which would let you define a "milestone", though it might be possible to do it on the basis of the frontend/druntime/phobos version.
It probably seems not-worth-doing unless you are making official releases anyway, but from my point of view as a "consumer" of LDC it feels like a nice option to be able to have a branch that is updated more slowly -- i.e. with material that isn't just the latest patches, but that has been around for a while so that the devs have had time to spot any holes.
