Replacing Make for the DMD build

[Atila Neves via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 18 June 2017 at 01:20:21 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Saturday, 17 June 2017 at 21:49:29 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Martin and Sebastian can correct me if I'm wrong, but unless I 
> am, Martin, Sebastian, and myself spend a scary amount of time 
> wrestling with makefiles. We have had bad production issues due 
> to makefiles, such as missing dependencies causing inconsistent 
> or broken builds (notably observable when something works only 
> without -j), typos or undefined variables resulting in bugs 
> being silently ignored (hey, I filed a PR to fix one of those 
> not half an hour ago - dmd#6916), CI checks being accidentally 
> completely switched off (which happened more than once!), the 
> win32.mak / win64.mak / posix.mak mess, super-ugly hacks due to 
> limitations of Make that slow down the build unconditionally 
> and/or make everything much more fragile and complicated... and 
> I could go on.
>
> [...]

reggae has a binary backend: i.e. it produces an executable that 
when run does the build. There are no dependencies on any 
external tools at that point, you only need a D compiler and 
you're in business. Which you already need to build dmd, druntime 
and phobos anyway.

Atila