A brief survey of build tools, focused on D

[Atila Neves]

On Monday, 10 December 2018 at 18:27:48 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote:
> I wrote a post about language-agnostic (or, more accurately, 
> cross- language) build tools, primarily using D as an example 
> and Dub as a benchmark.
>
> Spoiler: dub wins in speed, simplicity, dependency management, 
> and actually working without modifying the tool's source code.
>
> https://blog.ikeran.org/?p=339

No reggae? https://github.com/atilaneves/reggae/

dub is simple and has dependency management, and that's about it. 
Speed? It's as slow as molasses and hits the network every time 
unless explicitly told not to. Never mind if there's already a 
dub.selections.json file and all of the dependencies are fetched 
(which it could check but doesn't).

Trying to do anything non-trivial in dub is a exercise in 
frustration. The problem is that it's the de facto D package 
manager, so as soon as you have dependencies you need dub whether 
you want to or not.

dub works great if you're writing an executable with some 
dependencies and hardly any other needs. After that...