build system

[Martin Nowak]

On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:26:56 +0200, Gor Gyolchanyan  
<gor.f.gyolchanyan at gmail.com> wrote:

> I had a few thoughts about integrating build awareness into DMD.
> It would be really cool to add a flag to DMD to make it compile and
> link in all import-referenced modules.
> Also, it would be awesome to store basic build information in modules
> themselves in the form of special comments (much like documentation
> comments), where one could specify external build dependencies, output
> type, etc.
> There would be no need for makefiles and extra build systems. You'd
> just feed an arbitrary module to the compiler and the compiler would
> build the target, to which that module belongs (bu parsing build
> comments and package hierarchies).
> Wouldn't this be a good thing to have?

Some work in this direction has been done.
This proposal works by communicating url paths sources to an external
tool which is a flexible and good proposal.
It allows things as 'http://path/to/repo' for simple source file from
web fetching as well as 'pkg://experimental' for more sophisticated package
manager interaction.
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguageDevel/DIPs/DIP11

I've written a prototype implementation some weeks ago.

This still needs a way to communicated modules to build or link.
For now I've simply added a pragma(build, <package>) which builds
every import from this package (globally, it's a prototype).

Al together it can be used like this.
https://github.com/dawgfoto/graphics/blob/master/src/graphics/_.d

There are some issues though that would benefit from good ideas.
Especially a better solution for import path and build declarations
would be great.

DIP14 was not so well received.
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?LanguageDevel/DIPs/DIP14.

martin