On Saturday, 16 February 2013 at 22:58:42 UTC, Rob T wrote:
I'm having good success using D itself as the build tool
language, and I'm at the point now where I'm getting much
better results than what I was getting out of using external
build tools, so for me there's no looking back.
I run rdmd on a .d "script" that I wrote that's setup to do
exactly what I want.
What is missing from D is a good library of functions that are
generally useful for writing build scripts. Phobos already
supplies a great deal of what is needed that can be used to
construct what is missing.
The benefit of using D is that I do not have to install and
learn a secondary language or conform to a specific build
format, or follow any weird restrictions. What I want to do is
build my D code, not learn something new and perform acrobatics
to get the job done. I can even use the same D process to build
C/C++ code if I wanted to expand on it.
What I'm saying here is that I see no reason to use a language
other than D itself as the build tool. What D can use is an
addition to Phobos that supplies the necessary generalized
functions that all build tools should supply, and I don't think
there's all that much that's missing.
For a package manager, some standards may be required, but it
too can be done completely with D.
Why use json (which is a subset of javascript), or ruby, or
python, etc? Is there something fundamentally wrong with D that
makes it unsuitable for this role?
--rt
Indeed, it does sound like a sweet idea to provide a complete
library of D functions to help building a project and use D
itself as the build tool.
Maybe dub could offer the possibility to call D as an integrated
scripting language ?
