Dependency management in D

[Cliff via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 19 September 2014 at 19:22:22 UTC, ketmar via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Sep 2014 19:07:16 +0000
> Cliff via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> that's why dedicating people to work solely on build scripts and
> infrastructure is good, yet almost nobody does that. ah, 
> "enterprise
> BS" again. fsck "enterprise".
>
> as for build times: we always can write parsed and analyzed 
> ASTs to
> disk (something like delphi .dcu), thus skipping the most work 
> next
> time. and then we can compare cached AST with new if the source 
> was
> changed to see what exactly was changed and report that (oh, 
> there is
> new function, one function removed, one turned to template, and 
> so on).
> this will greatly speed up builds without relying on ugly
> "header/implementation" model.
>
> the only good thing "enterprise" can do is to contribute and 
> then
> support such code. but i'm sure they never will, they will only
> complaing about how they want "faster build times". hell with 
> 'em.

In a sense I sympathize with your antipath toward enterprises,
but the simple fact is they have a lot of money and command a lot
of developers.  For us, developers = mind share = more libraries
for us to use and more ideas to go around.  That's all goodness.
Leverage it for what it's worth.

I'm definitely a fan of finding ways to improve build speeds that
don't involve the creation of unnecessary (or worse, redundant)
and user maintained artifacts.  I'm also a fan of simplifying the
build process so that we don't have to have experts maintain
build scripts.