shebang launcher for D programs

[Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email)]

Daniel Keep wrote:
> 
> Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) wrote:
>> [snipitty do dah, snippity day]
>>
>> Which brings me to the question: what is the project style with D that
>> people use? What tool(s) do you use, and in what sequence?  The way I
>> currently do things is, I have a bunch of modules in a directory tree
>> and I import them in whichever programs I'm writing. I edit the program,
>> save it, and then just start it (the .d program; the fact that object
>> files and a binary executable are generated is entirely transparent)
>> from the command line. I never need to explicitly compile or build
>> anything, and I only see any messages (such as gcc's link command) when
>> the program has an error.
>>
>> Andrei
> 
> I have a slowly growing library of bits & pieces (stuff like my
> functools, vectors, colors, some concurrency stuff, etc.).  Any
> "throwaway" programs I write tend to end up in my D sandbox directory.
> 
> Things I will actually use/want to keep end up in a directory all of
> their own, with an appropriate package structure, etc.  I tend to have
> various GVim windows open, editing the source files.
> 
> In terms of running the programs, half the time I crack open a Cygwin
> bash shell and use "bud foo -clean -debug -etc -exec", "bud +foo -exec"
> if I've set up a build.cfg file, I've started using "rebuild -rffoo.rrf
> && foo" (which I hope is made a little cleaner in future), or just
> invoke it from the GVim window itself.
> 
> I rarely, if ever, use dmd directly, since I hate having all those extra
> files cavorting with my pristine source files, so I tend to use -clean
> an awful lot :)
> 
> The #! thing would be cool, but since I run Windows, I don't tend to use
> it.  That, and the fact that I tend to use lots of switches :3

Do your switches vary from one build to the next, or only from one file 
to the next? If the latter, you could use:

#!/path/to/rundmd -clean -debug -etc

as the first line of the program containing main(), and that works under 
cygwin. You don't have to build your program - ever. It builds itself 
when necessary.

> I think rdmd would be far more useful if it pulled in all the needed
> modules automatically like build and rebuild do.
> 
> I'm not sure associating .d files with rdmd under Windows would do much
> good.  One problem is that Windows makes a distinction between console
> and window apps, so either your console apps never output anything, or
> your window apps always have a console window lying around.  Python
> solves this by having python.exe and pythonw.exe (the latter is a window
> app, thus it has no console window), and using two extensions: .py and .pyw.
> 
> To be honest, I think that D really lacks one important thing that I
> would make shell/system scripting far more appealing: an interpreter.

I already use D largely as an interpreter. It takes about as long as the 
equivalent Perl script to build and run, and much less to run - with 
readln() of course :o). That's why I can't figure out people's 
indifference vis-a-vis the shebang. It fosters a very attractive 
development cycle. If I had to build each and all of my D programs 
before running and dedicate one flagged command to each, I'd be much 
more frustrated.


Andrei