[An open letter to DMC/C++ users from me. These are my opinions and mine only.]

I realize that Walter is busy off doing a lot of work on developing D, and D is a very promising language. But, there are the rest of us who use the C/C++ compiler heavily for everyday development. Overall, DMC is a high quality compiler, but all compilers have bugs.

I've noticed that a new crop of bug reports has shown up. Reporting bugs is one thing but getting them fixed is another. Walter is actually quite responsive, but he does have other things to do in life and I can imagine that he wants to work on fun things (like "D"). I can relate: after working for five years on my Ph.D. at UCLA, there was a point at which I just wanted to get it done and not do any more coding on FLAPPS (my topic) unless I had to. Fortunately, that story has a happy ending.

It seems to me that purchasing a CD doesn't represent enough of an incentive to getting bugs fixed. I would ask the vast majority of DMC users out there who use the compiler to make it worth Walter's valuable time to fix bugs by contributing to Digital Mars' PayPal account and putting in a vote for your favorite bug. Granted, this is a leap of faith on our part, since there is neither a direct way find out how much was contributed nor a direct way to find out what are people's favorite bugs. Indirectly, one can figure out what was important by seeing what's in a new compiler release.

In any case, this is merely my opinion -- Personally, I'm going to contribute $50.00 and vote for the precompiled header bug. I'm hoping others will do the same.


V/R and R/
Scott "I Come To Praise Walter, Not Bury Him" Michel, Ph.D.

Scott Michel <scottm@aero.org> wrote in news:cd91dj$de7$1@digitaldaemon.com:
> vote for the precompiled header bug

There is web interface to this newsgroup. Any chance you could provide url to the page with this bug report ?

Anyway I read this newsgroups since about 1.5 year and find Walter work very fair regarding well reported bugs argumented with reasons for fixing them. I have reported bugs to a few compilers and Walter is very good supporter in comparison to other developers.

ABX

W³odzimierz Skiba wrote:
> Scott Michel <scottm@aero.org> wrote in news:cd91dj$de7$1@digitaldaemon.com:
> 
>>vote for the precompiled header bug
> 
> 
> There is web interface to this newsgroup. Any chance you could provide url to the page with this bug report ?
> 
> Anyway I read this newsgroups since about 1.5 year and find Walter work very fair regarding well reported bugs argumented with reasons for fixing them. I have reported bugs to a few compilers and Walter is very good supporter in comparison to other developers.

Look for ph 1114 in the newsgroup.

Every so often, someone comes along and reports a bug, complaining that it's not fixed in 2.5 hours (insert your own ridiculous time frame if you don't like 2.5 hours.) My point was that if people think that a bug is important to them, like the slew of bugs recently reported, perhaps they should put some money where their bug report lies.

If you read what I wrote, I made a point about Walter being very responsive to bug reports. He is fixes bugs too, sometimes very rapidly. If I could, I'd fund Walter to fix the top 10 bugs on the list.


-scooter