Tip: Use -i to modify druntime/phobos without rebuilding them

[Manu]

On Sun, Feb 9, 2020 at 10:20 PM Jonathan Marler via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> Yesterday I wanted to test out some small changes to phobos.
> Rather than building and installing my own version of the
> compiler and libraries, I used a quick hack that allowed me to
> directly change the druntime/phobos source files from my current
> installation and see the results immediately.
>
> In this case I was playing with the "std.process" module in
> phobos.  I created a backup of src/phobos/std/process.d and
> started making changes.  All I needed to do in order to see these
> changes in my program was to include the "-i=std.process" option
> like this:
>
> dmd -i=std.process myapp.d
>
> A quick and dirty way to selectively change and test changes to
> phobos/druntime on any installed compiler.
>
> For those not familair with -i, the reason this works is that the
> "-i" flag causes all imports to be compiled, except for those
> under the "core", "std" and "etc" module namespaces.  However,
> you can override this by explicitly including any one of those
> namespaces.

Oh wow, cool tip! I never thought of that!