How do people feel about putting source compiler directives inside rdmd?

[Petar]

On Tuesday, 3 December 2019 at 06:55:41 UTC, Jonathan Marler 
wrote:
>
> I've had the same thoughts and feelings many times on this 
> forum and in the Dlang community in general.  I've learned to 
> spend less time trying to convince people so I can spend more 
> time doing what I love, which is programming.  If I can't 
> convince someone, or they are being unreasonable then I figure 
> out how I can get what I want without their permission.  It 
> usually means I must spend more time learning and possibly 
> duplicating effort, but in my experience the trade-off is 
> usually worth it.

I understand where you're coming from. I really appreciate the 
amount and quality of work that you have contributed to D over 
the years. I think it's quite unfortunate if D's community can't 
reach a consensus and work together, instead of being divided (or 
even just duplicating effort).

>
> After so much time arguing with people about rdmd, I created 
> rund.  As a result, I now have a much faster and better tool 
> that I've been using for over a year, and I've been spared a 
> large amount of frustration.  Since I sometimes use this tool 
> hundreds of times a day it was worth the investment, and I'm 
> very happy with the result.  If others want to use it, improve 
> it, or add it to package management systems then I'm happy to 
> work with them and will be glad to see it help others as well.

Given the amount of good work invested in D build tools, such as 
rdmd, rund, build.d and dub, it's really sad that they're 
becoming a source of contention and divisive among the D 
community.

I believe that the best thing that can happen to D is if all the 
effort that's invested across all of them gets merged into a 
single code base, maintained by all authors and endorsed by the 
community as whole.

I see no reason why we couldn't work on a shared code base that 
it's as easy and fast to use as rund, offer larger-scale 
development features, such as dependency management and also 
offer direct and expressive way to manually declare new targets, 
like build.d.