10th Birthday for GDC

[Andrej Mitrovic]

On 1/31/14, Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
> * Ask the community for help NOT on a large matter.

The way I see it both the GDC and LDC projects suffer from a difficult
barrier to entry for anyone new to the compilers. For example, to
build either of the compilers you need to go through a massive list of
things that you have to do **manually**:

http://wiki.dlang.org/GDC/Installation/Generic
http://wiki.dlang.org/Building_LDC_from_source

And those are Posix instructions. Windows instructions are typically
out of date, randomly break, have never been tested, missing crucial
info, etc etc. It's always a nightmare to build the damn thing.

Why aren't there simple scripts that can auto-build the compilers from
start to finish, including fetching the dependencies? For example,
someone made a script that makes building MinGW on Windows really
easy:

https://github.com/niXman/mingw-builds

You can build multiple versions of MinGW, and it actually works, and
its all automated.

Meanwhile to build DMD all it takes is make -f <your_platform>.mak. If
DMD wasn't so easy to build *I would have never contributed to it*.
But GDC and LDC have a huge barrier to entry, I honestly can't be
bothered to waste yet another afternoon following someone's latest
wiki entry on how to build their project, which typically fails in
some step N in the instructions.