[scons-users] Evolving the D tool for SCons

[H. S. Teoh]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 12:12:27PM +0000, Russel Winder wrote:
> I will likely be able to do some work on the D tool for SCons over the
> next few weeks. As preparation, I am wondering about the DMD, GDC, LDC
> issue and also the fact that currently DMD is only used as a
> front-end, GCC or whatever is used as the linker.

Thank you!!! The current D support in SCons is very spotty; I'm finding
myself having to redefine DCOM and LINKCOM in order to make things work.
I actually wanted to make some changes to D support in SCons for a while
now, but just never had to time to get around to it. Thanks for picking
this up!


> Do people see DMD, GDC, LDC as a trio of toolchains or as a single
> integrated toolchain. The former could be seen as divisive in that it
> means a specific tool chain is mandated for the build or the build
> person has to code up the handling of different tool chains, also it
> will lead to a restructuring of the SCons tools -- which is fine; the
> latter leads to needing to know the priority order for which toolchain
> to check on each supported platform.

DMD, GDC, and LDC are alternative compilers for D. Granted, they all use
the same frontend that comes from DMD, but they are independent of each
other and generally you'd pick one of them and stick to it in a single
project.


> The current SCons tool emphasises DMD, even to that being the name,
> and has only partial support for GDC, and none really for LDC.

I use GDC, and like I said, I find myself having to redefine LINKCOM and
DCOM in order to make things work.

It would be *really* nice if there was a way to tell SCons which
compiler to use and have it automatically set up Environment variables
to work for the selected compiler. Currently, I'm working on both my own
projects (GDC) and on some druntime/phobos code (DMD), so being able to
select which compiler to use is very important for me.


> I will only be able to work on and test a Linux-based set up and an
> ancient Snow Leopard machine. If anyone out there wants to chip in
> with help on other platforms (especially Windows) that would be great.
[...]

I'm using Debian/Linux (unstable) on an AMD 64-bit machine. I'm willing
to test stuff. But I don't have a windows development environment,
unfortunately. :-(


T

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Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it!  -- Mark Twain