A brief survey of build tools, focused on D

[Atila Neves]

On Monday, 10 December 2018 at 22:18:28 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Dec 2018 21:53:40 +0000, GoaLitiuM wrote:
>> The results for touching second file seems like an anomaly to 
>> me,
>
> The generated ninja file had one rule per source file. If your 
> modules tend to import each other a lot, or if they 
> transitively import the code that's doing expensive stuff, then 
> one rule per source file is bad. If your modules have few 
> transitive dependencies and they're each fast to compile, one 
> rule per source file is good.

In typical D code, it's usually faster to compile per package 
than either all-at-once or per module. Which is why it's the 
default in reggae.

> My project used Pegged, and a lot of stuff referenced the 
> grammar. That meant incremental builds went long and it would 
> have been better to build the whole project at once.
>
> Separating the grammar into a different build would reduce 
> compile times significantly, and that might make incremental 
> builds fast.

Using Pegged basically requires a dub subpackage with the grammar 
to retain one's sanity.

> From discussions on IRC about reducing compile times, though, 
> using Phobos is a good way to get slow compilation, and I use 
> Phobos. That alone means incremental builds are likely to go 
> long.

Yes. Especially with -unittest.