dmd/druntime/phobos makefile horror

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Friday, 16 December 2011 at 21:18:45 UTC, Brad Roberts wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Dec 2011, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>
>> On Friday, 16 December 2011 at 15:48:50 UTC, Trass3r wrote:
>> > (Another really bad one is dmd's makefile not allowing to 
>> > specify
>> > debug/release while the windows version sort of does)
>> 
>> I wonder, would it be hard to write our own make 
>> implementation (in D) to
>> replace the DigitalMars one? The goal would be to add support 
>> for all the GNU
>> extensions that the posix makefiles use (and the win32 ones 
>> make up for with
>> metric tons of copy-pasta), perhaps add built-ins for common 
>> POSIX commands,
>> and unify the makefiles.
>
> It'd be a lot harder than just using gnumake which already does 
> all that.  Why invest all the time it'd take when a very 
> workable solution already exists?

The answer to that question is the same one as why DMD on Windows 
doesn't use GNU make already. If the reason is significant (e.g. 
lots of dependencies, sub-par native Windows support, licensing), 
writing a make implementation doesn't seem too hard.