Compiling DMD on Windows: A journey of mystery and madness

[Seb via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 21 August 2016 at 18:57:25 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 08/21/2016 12:56 PM, Seb wrote:
>> 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
>
> How does the makefile unification help the lack of 
> documentation? -- Andrei

because (1) you need less documentation (just one file to 
document) and (2) the single file will be more 
tested/bullet-proof.

Anyways sorry about mentioning it - I know that such (a) a change 
shouldn't be taken lightly and it also may cause additional 
troubles and (b) it isn't that related to the problem of the 
poster.