On Sunday, 31 May 2015 at 23:56:42 UTC, Idan Arye wrote:
On Sunday, 31 May 2015 at 23:11:24 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
There's this recent trend seen with git and go - all tooling
is entered by a single command.
Are there advantages to doing the same for our toolchain?
(Consider it'll include things such as dub, dfix, and dformat
in the future.) Something like "dc", a program that parses the
command line and dispatches it to the appropriate tool(s).
How would this add value to our toolchain?
Andrei
This is creating a "namespace", which has all sorts of benefits:
1) Easier help - `dc --help` shows basic description of all
subtools.
2) Better names - since all tools reside in the `dc` command
anyways they can have names based on what they do and not some
acronym or a made-up project name. Instead of `dub` and `rdmd`
we can have `dc build` and `dc run-script` - which convey what
they do right away.
3) Containment - since all tools are under `dc`, and assuming
`dc` can have some general-purpose flags, it's easier to build
wrappers around it. You've mentioned git - there is a Git
plugin for Vim called Fugitive that in addition for
implementing commands that give special treatment wrapping to
some Git commands, also offers the general `:Git` command, that
can run any Git command you like and sets the general `git`
flags to play better with Vim. It can do so because all Git
commands start with `git `. Not sure yet how this property of
single-entry-point-tool-chain will benefit D though - it
depends on what the general flags for `dc` will be...
It would also make it easier to integrate the tools into an IDE.
Yeah, definitely, it'd be nice to have a one-stop executable
(similar to dub). I like `dlang`. E.g. to build with GDC:
dlang build release gdc
Maybe (on Windows) an option for DLLs and linking to C libraries
would be nice too.
