D based build system to replace current makefile

Jonathan M Davis jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Thu May 30 13:56:48 PDT 2013


On Thursday, May 30, 2013 16:47:49 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Also, while I like the idea of replacing makefiles with a D solution,
> I'm unsure whether it's really a good idea because that may make it
> more difficult to bootstrap DMD to run on new platforms.

I would point out that we're going to have that problem anyway once we move 
the compiler to D. At some point, already having a fully functional D compiler 
_will_ be required in order to build dmd, druntime, and Phobos. If we switched 
to using D for writing the build scripts before switching the compiler to D, 
we'd simply be introducing that circular dependency earlier. So, that 
shouldn't ultimately be much of a factor in whether we make the switch.

Whether we switch to using D scripts for building dmd, druntime, and Phobos 
should depend on whether the result would be more maintainable and still be 
able to reasonably do everything that we need our build system to do. And 
while many of us really aren't very good at make and find the Makefiles that we 
have to be rather obtuse, folks that are more proficient at make might not 
think that making the switch to a D script would make sense. And I really 
don't know what the tradeoffs would be.

I did go with writing my build script in D for a recent project which was 
generating a document written in ddoc, and it's working out quite well to do 
that, but I don't know whether it ultimately makes sense to do the same for 
the dmd toolchain.

- Jonathan M Davis


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