A brief survey of build tools, focused on D

[Neia Neutuladh]

On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 02:54:15 +0000, Mike Franklin wrote:
> Why not just write your build/tooling scripts in D?  That's what I
> prefer to do, and there's been a recent effort to do just that for the
> DMD compiler as well:
> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/blob/master/src/build.d  It still resembles
> the makefiles it was modeled from, but in time, I think it will clean up
> nicely.

That's fine for executables that don't depend on external libraries. It's 
not good for libraries that I want other people to use; dub's the easiest 
way to publish a thing. It also means I need to replicate that dependency 
graph logic in every single project, which is worse than replicating it 
once per language. We really should have a standard build tool supporting 
per-language plugins, like H. S. Teoh is recommending.