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

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Mon, 12 Aug 2013 17:44:35 -0700
Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:

> On 8/12/2013 5:19 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >> 5. Do we really want D to be restricted to only platforms that have
> >> the latest Python up on them?
> >
> > I think that's a bit of hyperbole. It's the same as saying "do we
> > want D to be restricted to only platforms that have g++/make
> > installed?"
> 
> No, I don't think it's hyperbole. I would bet that a C++ compiler
> (which invariably come with a make) exists on essentially every
> platform 32 bits or larger. Python? Doesn't seem likely.
> 

Yea, while python is indeed hugely widespread, it still doesn't compete
with C++/make in availability. There are people who deliberately avoid
having scripting packages like python on certain systems for various
legitimate reasons.

Plus (and this is one of my primary beefs with Python), tools written
in Python often have a tendency to expect a certain version of Python
(or even certain lib dependencies), and it's up to the person *running*
the program to make sure the script is given the right installation of
Python. Woe is the user who gets it wrong, because they'll just be
greeted with a big internal traceback. It's not like Java where you can
install whatever runtimes you need and things will pretty much just run
themselves on the correct version automatically, or tell you what
expected version you're missing.

(Not that I'm advocating make, either)