Compiling DMD on Windows: A journey of mystery and madness

[Seb via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 21 August 2016 at 16:41:27 UTC, NX wrote:
> [warning: rant ahead]
>
> I'm amazed by the lack of documentation - or to say it better, 
> documentation that works - on how to compile DMD and eventually 
> Phobos. Here 
> [https://wiki.dlang.org/Starting_as_a_Contributor#Windows_2] we 
> have awfully categorized yet promising information on how to 
> seriously compile DMD from source.

There are usually three Makefile posix.mak, win32.mak and 
win64.mak.
As you might expect it's quite a pain to keep them updated and as 
core developers on Windows are in the minority, the Windows 
Makefiles often lack features or have other "mysterious ways".
Imho the best way to deal with this problem is to unify the 
Makefiles by (a) using a cross-platform build tool like reggae 
(see [1] for one of the discussions), (b) figure out what 
commands are possible in a cross-platform way and merge win{32, 
64}.mak back to the common Makefile.

[1] 
http://forum.dlang.org/post/wckshfgkltmmcgmbbitu@forum.dlang.org