incremental builds for D projects... challenging or close at hand?

[Jason E. Aten]

> On Sat, 19 Mar 2011 12:19:58 +0100, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> What are people's experiences with the various options for build
>> systems with D?
> 
> It's not very easy to make an incremental build system for D because of
> several reasons. Some are due to how the language works and some are due
> to how DMD works:
> 
> * DMD doesn't output all data in all the object files - This can perhaps
> be solved by compiling with the -lib switch
> 
> * When you change one D file you need to recompile ALL files that depend
> on the changed file. To compare with C/C++ which has source and header
> files you only need to recompile the source file if you change it
> 
> * DMD doesn't keep the fully qualified module name when naming object
> files resulting in foo.bar will conflict with bar.bar. Issue 3541.

[The above is from the packaging system discussion in the "a cabal for 
D?" thread; here I am branching this to a new topic because I'd like 
anyone interested in incremental build processes to notice and contribute 
if they have input.]

That is an interesting observation, Jacob. Thank you for pointing that 
out. 

Is there anything else (open question anyone) that would prevent D 
projects from doing incremental builds?  Lack of support for incremental 
builds is a show stopper.  Or in this case, the show would never get 
funded to begin with.

Or to ask it another way, what would it take to get incremental builds?