build system

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-10-26 12:26, Gor Gyolchanyan wrote:
> I had a few thoughts about integrating build awareness into DMD.
> It would be really cool to add a flag to DMD to make it compile and
> link in all import-referenced modules.
> Also, it would be awesome to store basic build information in modules
> themselves in the form of special comments (much like documentation
> comments), where one could specify external build dependencies, output
> type, etc.
> There would be no need for makefiles and extra build systems. You'd
> just feed an arbitrary module to the compiler and the compiler would
> build the target, to which that module belongs (bu parsing build
> comments and package hierarchies).
> Wouldn't this be a good thing to have?

Sounds horrible to have a build script in comments in the source code. I 
think the right approach is to have a separate build tool, with a proper 
DSL built on an existing language, e.g. Ruby, D, something else.

There are already a couple of build tools available:

DSSS - D1 only, not maintained any more
xfbuild - Probably not maintained any more. No build script
rdmd - Cannot build libraries, no build script, cannot do much besides 
from building executables

I've been working on a build tool, https://bitbucket.org/doob/dake . 
I've started rewriting the tool in D, been a while since I worked on it. 
Currently it's not a prioritized project for me.

I also know others are working on built tools for D.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg