On Wednesday, 13 September 2017 at 19:55:03 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
I'm not sure this makes much sense, but it's something that's
been rolling around in my head the past 2-3 days.
One of the great things about Python's Anaconda is that you
just download one file, install and it just works. In D, dub
offers comparable functionality as conda, which is very
helpful. Usually it doesn't take much to get up and running
with dub. This is especially true with projects that only use D
code. However, things can get a little more complicated when a
dub project in turn depends on some C library or something. I
think this particularly applies to static binding. In my
experience, it's usually far easier to deal with these sorts of
issues with Linux than Windows. This additional difficulty
likely would make it less likely that some Windows user would
switch from Python to D.
To reduce this difficulty, given some C library that already
has D bindings available, I would start a separate dub project
that just includes the .lib or .dlls necessary for Windows.
Then, a wrapper (or more generally, any library that uses the
bindings) could then have a dub sub-configuration such that
Windows requires the previous dub project and uses it for
dll/libs (also including a switch that would allow the user to
put the path to them manually).
This way the user could download the D binding themselves and
do things manually, or they could use the wrapper and have a
"just works" experience on Windows (with the option for manual
customization).
Am I making sense here? Anything I haven't thought of?
No you are not, it's just currently a bit painful to do manually
due to e.g. missing support for git submodules.
However, some projects already do this:
Windows: https://github.com/ariovistus/pyd/blob/master/dub.json
And for Linux it's even possible to compile small dependencies on
the fly:
https://github.com/dlang-community/drepl/pull/63
Imho if the library is small, compiling it (or using prebuilt for
Windows), should be the default behavior because it's a very
pleasant user experience
