Have Win DMD use gmake instead of a separate DMMake makefile?

[Russel Winder]

On Sun, 2013-08-11 at 15:41 -0700, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 09:26:11AM +0100, Russel Winder wrote:
> > On Sat, 2013-08-10 at 14:27 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > […]
> > > is discovering and dealing with all the fun little differences
> > > between the posix and win32 makefiles (and now we have some win64
> > > makefiles as well).
> > […]
> > 
> > Isn't this sort of problem solved by using SCons, Waf or (if you
> > really have to) CMake?
> [...]
> 
> +1. But people around here seems to have a beef against anything that
> isn't make. *shrug*

Make was a revolution and a revelation in 1977, it changed my life.
However, it is sad to see projects such as Rust, Julia and D clinging to
a 35 year old build concept when it has been proved time and time again
that external DSL frameworks for build do not work for cross-platform
working. Only internal DSL build frameworks have succeeded in that
arena, cf. Gradle, SBT, SCons, Waf,…

The only part of this thread that has any up side at all is to ditch all
build frameworks and write the build in D over the bootstrap D that will
be essential for the D build since D is written in D. It's a pity Rust
hasn't twigged to this.

I note that the Go tooling is written is C and Go, they ditched make
when they realized their vision for packaging – which works very well
indeed, particularly pulling in source packages from GitHub, BitBucket
and Launchpad, compiling and installing the compiled package into the
appropriate place for use.

On the other hand, I bet a cross-platform SCons build of D could be in
place and production within days as opposed to the
<substitute-your-favourite-long-time> that a D rewrite in D will take.
It doesn't matter than the SCons build may be thrown away down the line,
it solves a problem now for not that much effort.

Still if the core D community are clinging to "build == make", then they
will have to suffer the irritant of having to have a separate build
system for each and every platform. That's they way Make is.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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