Thanks for your pull request, @WalterBright!

Bugzilla references

Your PR doesn't reference any Bugzilla issue.

If your PR contains non-trivial changes, please reference a Bugzilla issue or create a manual changelog.

Testing this PR locally

If you don't have a local development environment setup, you can use Digger to test this PR:

dub run digger -- build "master + dmd#23209"

It's been a while since I've had such a frustrating bug hunt.

Do not pull.

Use draft PRs for that.

Finally got this to work. It was quite a mess.

@thewilsonator ready to merge

Out of curiousity, why did this PR involve so many force pushes? Were you unable to test the changes locally?

The problem was I didn't have much to duplicate the problems locally, so I used the test suite. It takes about an hour to run it through. The next problem is the test suite normally gives me just a pass/fail and not much else. So I do a binary search to find the problem, which can take a lot of iterations. Sometimes it would fail bootstrapping the compiler, sometimes compiling the library. Sometimes I did not find all the places where the list was used in the compiler.

It was also clumsy to have both the list and the array active at the same time.

Any how, I'm glad to be rid of the list. The code is much easier to read now.

The problem was I didn't have much to duplicate the problems locally, so I used the test suite

You can run the test suite locally, it's documented in compiler/test/README.md. I can assist you if you need help.

Sometimes it would fail bootstrapping the compiler, sometimes compiling the library.

I'm working on that: #23213