build system

[jsternberg]

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?

Take a look at Cabal and ghc-pkg/ghc --make from Haskell. I've been thinking about starting to put together something like this, but I haven't found the motivation to do it. This type of package management and build integration would go a long way to making D less decentralized.

One thing that would be needed to complete such a system is proper support for linking shared libraries (at least on Linux).

There are a bunch of things the build system could do that would make development in D much easier.

If you're interested in doing this, you should contact me on the IRC channel.