On Friday, 18 January 2019 at 18:48:00 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
I'm also not a big fan of dub, but I'm in the minority around these parts. Having grown up on makefiles and dealt with them in a large project at my day job, I've developed a great distaste for them, and nowadays the standard build tool I reach for is SCons. Though possibly in the not-so-distant future I might start using something more scalable like Tup, or Button, written by one of our very own D community members. But for small projects, just plain ole dmd is Good Enough(tm) for me.
The trick with makefiles is that they work well for a single developer, or a single project, but become an issue when dealing with multiple libraries, each one coming with its own makefile (if you're lucky, if you're not, you have multiple CMake/SCons/etc. systems to deal with). Makefiles are very tricky to do crossplatform, especially on Windows, and usually they aren't enough, I've often seen people use bash/python/ruby scripts to drive the building process anyway.
The big thing dub provides is package management. Having a package manager is an important thing for a language nowadays. Gone are the days of hunting for library source, figuring out where to put includes. Just add a line in your dub.json file and you have the library. Need to upgrade to newer version? Just change the version in dub.json file. Need to download the problem from scratch? No problem, dub can use the json file to download all the dependencies in proper versions.
