Make IN Dlang

[H. S. Teoh]

On Wed, Nov 02, 2022 at 03:08:36PM +0000, JN via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> On Tuesday, 1 November 2022 at 23:40:22 UTC, Christian Köstlin wrote:
> >                  sh("touch %s".format(t.name));
> 
> One of the problems of many Make-like tools is that they offer lots of
> freedom, especially when allowing you to launch arbitrary shell
> commands. But this also comes with drawbacks, because this touch
> command will instantly break Windows builds, might also be a problem
> on some non-Linux platforms like macOS. Declarative approach from
> tools like dub might be restrictive, but it also lets me as a user
> know that I can download an arbitrary dub project and 99% chance it
> will just compile out of the box on Windows.

IMO, the ideal situation is a hybrid situation: the underlying build
mechanism should be purely declarative, because otherwise the complexity
just goes out of control and you end up with non-portability,
non-reproducible builds, intractibility of static analysis (e.g., for an
external tool to understand what the build does).  However, quite often
in a large project you need to perform some complex tasks, and doing
this declaratively can be too cumbersome.  So what you want is a
procedural element to the build description that *generates* the
underlying declarative elements of the build.  The procedural part does
not perform any build actions; its job is to generate the declarative
build description.  The actual build is carried out based on this
declarative build description.


T

-- 
Life would be easier if I had the source code. -- YHL