Reggae v0.0.5 super alpha: A build system in D

[Dicebot via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Friday, 3 April 2015 at 17:17:50 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
> On Friday, 3 April 2015 at 17:13:41 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>> Also I don't see any point in yet another meta build system. 
>> The very point of initial discussion was about getting D only 
>> cross-platform solution that won't require installing any 
>> additional software but working D compiler.
>
> I was also thinking of a binary backend (producing a binary 
> executable that does the build, kinda like what ctRegex does 
> but for builds), and also something that just builds it on the 
> spot.
>
> The thing is, I want to get feedback on the API first and 
> foremost, and delegating the whole 
> do-I-or-do-I-not-need-to-build-it logic to programs that 
> already do that (and well) first was the obvious (for me) 
> choice.
>
> Also, Ninja is _really_ fast.

The thing is, it may actually affect API. The way I have 
originally expected it, any legal D code would be allowed for 
build commands instead of pure DSL approach. So instead of 
providing high level abstraction like this:

const mainObj  = Target("main.o",  "dmd -I$project/src -c $in 
-of$out", Target("src/main.d"));
const mathsObj = Target("maths.o", "dmd -c $in -of$out", 
Target("src/maths.d"));
const app = Target("myapp", "dmd -of$out $in", [mainObj, 
mathsObj]);

.. you instead define dependency building blocks in D domain:

struct App
{
     enum  path = "./myapp";
     alias deps = Depends!(mainObj, mathsObj);

     static void generate()
     {
         import std.process;
         enforce(execute([ "dmd",  "-ofmyapp", deps[0].path, 
deps[1].path]).status);
     }
}

And provide higher level helper abstractions on top of that, 
tuned for D projects. This is just random syntax I have just 
invented for example of course. It is already possible to write 
decent cross-platform scripts in D - only dependency tracking 
library is missing. But of course that would make using other 
build systems as backends impossible.