On Sat, 2017-06-17 at 12:20 -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote: > […] > It's highly unlikely it would be accepted:
So it is highly unlikely I am going to offer to do any work on it then. I am extremely disappointed in the attitude displayed by your reply, it shows a lack of interest in doing things better. This is ironic in the extreme given it is the build infrastructure for a compiler for programming language supposedly to help make things better for programmers. > 1. make is ubiquitous. It's not something we have to scrounge to find > on > platform X, it's already there. People already are familiar with it > (even if > they hate it). "is ubiquitous" is a lazy answer. Python is ubiquitous to the same extent. Of course you still have to install make so actually it isn't as ubiquitous as the comment implies. > 2. we're in the D business, not the project build business. It's > easier to get > past that "first 5 minutes" if everything about D other than D itself > is > familiar and conventional. You may be in the D business and already know the Make-based framework intimately, but it is a barrier to anyone else wanting to contribute. The inference must thus be that you don't want new contributors to the compiler. That's fine, but a dead end for the future of D. > 3. to steal from Churchill, `make` is the worst form of build system > except for > all the others Argumentation by false analogy. > 4. much as I dislike make, the time spent wrestling with it is a > vanishingly > tiny slice of time compared to what spent on the rest of D. Getting > that time > slice to zero will have no effect on productivity, and I'm not > convinced that a > newer build system will even reduce that time slice at all (see point > 5). As you have no experience you have no data point. Everyone else, who does have actual data is moaning like crazy about staying with a pure Make/Shell system. The world has moved forward in build in the last 40 years, can I suggest you try and learn a little bit about it. > 5. D has a more complex build process than it should. Using another > build system > won't make that complexity go away. Yes it will. > 6. unlike the choice to use github, there is no clear winner in the > `make` > category of build tools. If the industry has moved on from make to X, > then we > should, too. But it has not. Yes it has. I suspect you are focussing too much on the D compiler internals and not enough on the programmer development environment and tools progress that has been made in the last 20 years. > 7. the current makefiles for DMD suffer from over-engineering, i.e. > making > simple things complicated and excessively using obscure features of > make. This > isn't really the fault of make. Again faulty reasoning. Replacing a system is a way of getting rid of crap and getting something better. I am not a fan of fashion or fadism in software development, but neither am I a fan of ignoring all progress so as pretend nothing has changed. There is nothing wrong with a project changing its build system on a regular, although not too frequent, basis. D should be there at the cutting edge of software development in its own environment as an integral part of the pitch to the developers. Rust and Go have done this – well Go has a problem with vendoring, but like most of the Go community, we'll pretend it isn't a big problem. Reggae is D's pitch in the CMake and Meson class of meta-build tools. Why aren't all the D compiler and tool developments using it? Or if Reggae is a step too far because it is a D program offering D (or Python, Lua,…) specifications of build, use Meson. -- Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 voip: sip:russel.win...@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: rus...@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk skype: russel_winder
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
