On Friday, 29 November 2013 at 05:14:14 UTC, brad clawsie wrote:
First I tried installing dmd from source, which was fine but then I would get strange errors about referring to a file "object.d" when trying to build dub. Some poking around on the web resulted in the advice of installing the pre-built dmd binary that is in the release distribution.
I really have to agree. I recently had to set up an environment for contributing to phobos but the whole experience was a bit ... tedious. I ended up just using dmd.2.064.2.zip and putting the git repos in the src folder and making a bunch of scripts to move the built binaries into their correct positions. Being in the unique position of programming on Windows, Mac, and Linux, I've had to rewrite the coping script differently for each one. Windows is the worst for that sort of thing, but that's to be expected.
The whole build process is a lot more involved than it really should be. Ideally you should be able to clone dmd, phobos, and druntime and just have everything compile and be put into a relative path together and just "work". Maybe alert you if you don't have phobos and druntime to build. Ultimately, you really "have to" download the binary version if you want it to work transparently, but it would be nice if it were easy enough to build from source that a printed 1 page guide would get you 100% running.
I feel HTTP serving is so common that it should be one of the accepted "batteries included" by default.
That I'm not sure I'd agree with. Maybe getting stuff via HTTP (we have curl at a.t.m.) but serving HTTP files really needs something more substantial than I'd feel comfortable being in the standard library. Something too simple would likely not be used in favor of something like vibe.d while something the size of vibe.d probably is a bit too expansive to really be considered for part in the standard library. Not to mention the fact that vibe.d is in reasonably rapid development. The speed of vibe.d releases outpaces DMD releases and I think that's a positive thing overall.
Plus I feel like such an approach might make "simpler" things suffer (or, at least, make them feel like they suffer). Every time I use python I think "it's so nice that I can write an advanced http server with ssl encryption serving up a calculated meaning of life and the last digit of pi in one line, but I have to write an iterator to iterate over elements pairwise, which I'd really think should be in the standard library somewhere." (A "recipe" for it is in itertools which, strangely, suggests that they know how often it might be needed but failed to add it as an actual part of the standard library, but I digress...)
