A brief survey of build tools, focused on D

Neia Neutuladh neia at ikeran.org
Tue Dec 11 04:52:12 UTC 2018


On Mon, 10 Dec 2018 13:01:08 -0800, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> It also requires network access.  On *every* invocation, unless
> explicitly turned off.  And even then, it performs time-consuming
> dependency resolutions on every invocation, which doubles or triples
> incremental build times.  Again, unacceptable.

I feel like those should be configuration options at the very worst. And 
dub probably shouldn't even bother verifying your dependencies if you 
haven't changed dub.json.

> Then it requires a specific source layout, with incomplete /
> non-existent configuration options for alternatives.  Which makes it
> unusable for existing code bases.  Unacceptable.

A lot of people do find it acceptable to have a build tool that makes 
assumptions about your source code layout, but that's certainly not always 
possible or desirable.

> Worst of all, it does not support custom build actions, which is a
> requirement for many of my projects.

Yeah, there's a lot of neat metaprogramming stuff in D (like pegged) where 
it's awesome with small projects that it's part of compilation, but when 
I'm dealing with a nontrivial instance of it, I want to split it into a 
separate build step. Dub doesn't help me accomplish that.

> After so many decades of "advancement", we're still stuck in the
> gratuitously incompatible walled gardens, like the gratuitous browser
> incompatibilities of the pre-W3C days of the Web. And on modern CPUs
> with GHz clock speeds, RAM measured in GBs, and gigabit download speeds,
> building Hello World with a system like dub (or Gradle, for that matter)
> is still just as slow (if not slower!) as running make back in the 90's
> on a 4 *kHz* processor.  It's ridiculous.

Solving an NP-complete problem every time you build is not a great start.

> Why can't modern source code come equipped with dependency information
> in a *standard format* that can be understood by *any* build system?

Kythe is an attempt to make the relevant information available in a 
language-agnostic way. Might be a reasonable basis for a standardized 
build system. No clue how well it works or what it actually supports.

https://kythe.io/

> Build systems shouldn't need to reinvent their own gratuitously
> incompatible DSL just to express what's fundamentally the same old
> decades-worn directed graph. And programmers shouldn't need to repeat
> themselves by manually enumerating individual graph edges (like Meson
> apparently does).

Meson doesn't have you enumerate individual graph edges at that level. It 
just doesn't build your project correctly. Change a struct size in one 
file, and you get a host of weird errors when another file uses it.

Maven and Gradle also don't really have a DAG like that. If any file 
changed, your whole project needs to be rebuilt, and all your dependencies 
are immutable. Bazel has a DAG across build rules, not across individual 
files.

> - Efficient: the amount of work done by the build should be proportional
>   to the size of changes made to the source code since the last build,
>   NOT proportional to the size of the entire source tree (SCons fails in
>   this regard).

Would be great if the tool could pay attention to whether incremental 
builds saved time on average and just do a full build if it's better.

> - Language-agnostic: the build system should be essentially a dependency
>   graph resolver. It should be able to compile (possibly via plugins)
>   source code of any language using any given compiler, provided such a
>   combination is at all possible. In fact, at its core, it shouldn't
>   even have the concept of "compilation" at all; it should be able to
>   generate, e.g., .png files from POVRay scene description files, run
>   image post-processing tools on them, then package them into a tarball
>   and upload it to a remote webserver -- all driven by the same
>   underlying DAG.

You could support rsync just fine, but if it's just an HTTP upload, 
there's no standard way to tell if the server's got the file already.


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