On the performance of building D programs

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 4/5/13 3:29 AM, Dicebot wrote:
> I was very unpleasantly surprised to know from that thread about dmd
> doing everything but object file creation during rdmd dependency
> tracking step. That feels very inefficient and probably only reason this
> has not caught any attention is generally fast dmd compilation speed.
> This case begs for better integration between dmd and rdmd or even
> moving some functionality of rdmd to front-end.

Well rdmd caches the result of the dependency collection step and it 
won't rebuild dependencies unless necessary. Anyhow I think it makes a 
lot of sense for dmd to automatically link .d files imported by the main 
program compiled. A bunch of language features (e.g. no classes spread 
across modules) and approach to modularity (e.g. separate notions of .di 
and .d) make that natural.

Andrei