Rebuild - an annoying feature

Neil Vice sardonicpresence at gmail.com
Tue Mar 11 01:46:19 PDT 2008


"Ty Tower" <tytower at hotmail.com.au> wrote:
> Interesting read Neil and nothing there I could not agree with -Thanks

I am pleased to hear that.

> I have dwt working and am experimenting -Its worth the look and I do like 
> the "D"  language itself.

Good to hear things are working in the end.

> I'm not knowledgeable enough to say but isn't dmd just a wrapped up gcc?

Well, depending on exactly what you mean I suggest that that is not the case 
at all. DMD (and associated OPTLINK) as I understand it have been written 
from scratch by Walter, at least in part based on his previous work on C and 
C++ compilers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright

Both being compilers, GCC (or more correctly GDC in the case of D) and DMD 
certainly perform the same task but the code is completely independant, with 
the exception of the shared front-end in the case of GDC - where GDC has 
borrowed from DMD not the other way around.

> Anyway no matter , its rebuild wrapped as dsss thats giving me problems 
> and getting good installation notes from digitalmars and tango. All of D 
> Tango Phobos dwt was new for me a month ago and the old configure ,make 
> ,make install always worked for me . I must have had failures but only 
> back at least 5 years ago

I admit I haven't attempted to build anyone elses code (e.g. the DWT 
examples) but except for a couple of snags I haven't had much issue building 
my own. As far as installation goes, I had a couple of false starts but once 
I realised you can just dump the "dm" and "dmd" directories under e.g. /usr 
and just put /usr/dmd/bin in your PATH then I have had no troubles at all. 
Again I haven't worked with Tango though.

As I indicated previously, I had some issues with rebuild and dsss. I recall 
now that I had some issues with files not being rebuilt unless I explicitly 
"touch"ed them or something and as such went back to 'make' and 'cook' - 
just my personal preference I think. I did have some linking issues where 
DMD didn't generate the odd symbol if I compiled all source files in one 
build, rather than seperate builds with -c then a seperate linking step - 
presumably a compiler bug - but now I've got my own build environment set-up 
I can get on with coding in D =) 





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