Which language futures make D overcompicated?

[rikki cattermole]

On 11/02/2018 11:40 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Sunday, February 11, 2018 11:26:30 rikki cattermole via Digitalmars-d
> wrote:
>> On 11/02/2018 11:18 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
>>> Clearly though there is a problem with Dub as a build system for many
>>> of it's users – or rather people who try and reject.
>>
>> Put simply, they expect far too much.
>> Dub's scope is limited, lets not forget that.
> 
> The problem with that is that if dub is the way to build D projects in
> general, then it needs to be able to do pretty much whatever you need to do
> for pretty much any project - even if that involves backdoors. You need to
> be able to do arbitrary stuff with your builds.
> 
> It's not as critical for applications so long as dub provides an easy way to
> link in any libraries that it pulls in, but dub needs to be able to build
> libraries no matter what crazy stuff you need to do, otherwise, those
> libraries can't interact with the dub ecosystem, and dub is how D projects
> in general pull in their dependencies.
> 
> So, for instance, if your D library has to build C or C++ code and link that
> in as part of what it does, that needs to be possible with dub, even if dub
> itself doesn't handling building code that isn't D. Also, if you need to
> generate code as part of your build and then build those files, that needs
> to be possible. And the way that dub is set up at this point, that sort of
> stuff is rather difficult to do.
> 
> dub wouldn't have to be all that powerful if it were simply a handy build
> tool for the average use case, but when it's tied in to package management
> for D libraries and is the primary way that D projects pull in libraries, it
> needs to be far more than a simple build tool. And right now, it's not far
> enough away from being a simple build tool.
> 
> - Jonathan M Davis

Dub can do everything that you have described.
You are fully free to run cmake if you wish before the build. Will it 
result in binaries that are decent? Probably not for most use cases.

Its a hard problem to solve, I just wish people respected dub's scope 
more. Because it is very decently well scoped for its job already.