What are the worst parts of D?

[Cliff via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 25 September 2014 at 18:51:13 UTC, H. S. Teoh via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> You don't know if
> recompiling after checking out a previous release of your code 
> will
> actually give you the same binaries that you shipped 2 months 
> ago.

To be clear, even if nothing changed, re-running the build may
produce different output.  This is actually a really hard problem
- some build tools actually use entropy when producing their
outputs, and as a result running the exact same tool with the
same parameters in the same [apparent] environment will produce a
subtly different output.  This may be intended (address
randomization) or semi-unintentional (generating a unique GUID
inside a PDB so the debugger can validate the symbols match the
binaries.)  Virtually no build system in use can guarantee the
above in all cases, so you end up making trade-offs - and if you
don't really understand those tradeoffs, you won't trust your
build system.

What else may mess up the perfection of repeatability of your
builds?  Environment variables, the registry (on Windows), any
source of entropy (the PRNG, the system clock/counters, any
network access), etc.

Build engineers themselves don't trust the build tooling because
for as long as we have had the tooling, no one has invested
enough into knowing what is trustworthy or how to make it that
way.  It's like always coding without a typesafe language, but
which "gets the job done."  Until you've spent some time in the
typesafe environment, maybe you can't realize the benefit.
You'll say "well, now I have to type a bunch more crap, and in
most cases it wouldn't have helped me anyway" right up until you
are sitting there at 3AM the night before shipping the product
trying to track down why your Javascript program - I mean build
process - isn't doing what you thought it did.  Just because you
CAN build a massive software system in Javascript doesn't mean
the language is per-se good - it may just mean you are sufficient
motivated to suffer through the pain.  I'd rather make the whole
experience *enjoyable* (hello TypeScript?)

Different people will make different tradeoffs, and I am not here
to tell Andrei or Walter that they *need* a new build system for
D to get their work done - they don't right now.  I'm more
interested in figuring out how to provide a platform to realize
the benefits for build like we have for our modern languages, and
then leveraging that in new ways (like better sharing between the
compiler, debugger, IDEs, test and packaging.)