On 12/8/2011 6:13 PM, Andrew Gough wrote:
On Wed, 7 Dec 2011 20:56:17 +0100
Jens Mueller<[email protected]> wrote:
Andrew Gough wrote:
On Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:14:25 +0000
Russel Winder<[email protected]> wrote:
SCons is a Python-based build tool to replace Make and much of the
Autotools functionality. It has D support as part of the core.
This support is though in need of development.
The new Mercurial/BitBucket infrastructure for developing SCons
(replacing the old Subversion/Tigris set up) is now in place, a
new release 2.1.0 has been declared and everything is open for
business leading to a 2.2.0 release.
I got my changes to support DMD 2 into this release :-)
However, support for GDC, LDC, etc. is almost certainly still
sadly lacking, and indeed the support for DMD almost certainly
needs a severe refactoring and most likely a rewrite.
Rather than people having to work on a clone of SCons in order to
work on the tool, I have created a separate Mercurial repository
(https://bitbucket.org/russel/scons_dmd_new) as a development
version of just the tool. When a new version of this separate
tool is declared I create a pull request for the SCons mainline
to get the new version in the next version of SCons.
Is anyone else other than me interested in using SCons as a build
tool with D code? If there is, perhaps we can collaborate in
some way to progress SCons support for all the various
realizations of D?
I think the build tool question is in need of the same level of high
level design and support that Steve Teale is working on for
std.database/std.sql.
It seems there is SCons support (python), CMake, Orbit (Ruby), DSSS
(D1 only?), xfbuild, dake, rdmd options - I've added preliminary D
support to premake.
Where do I find your changes for premake?
https://bitbucket.org/goughy/premake-dev-d
Would it be a good idea to thrash out the arguments for/against a
particular tool, and build/support just one? The community doesn't
seem big enough to be so fragmented. Java has Ant, Scala has sbt -
surely D should have a canonical build tool?
I'm unsure whether D needs its own configuration/build tool. It
definitely needs a package manager.
For building there are different options but usually it's make. Most
people (at least for sure on Unix variants) are using it. I think
Scons does both building and configuring. Just want to say that you
can have different tools for these jobs or single one.
Jacob's build tool looks good but I wonder what are the major
improvements over e.g. make (portability is an issue with make; maybe
simplicity).
For configuring there are some options and so far none of them is
preferred by a majority. Different people weigh different aspects
differently. But it seems people are moving away from configure
scripts.
As Russell already said, several build/configuration tools are used
and there is no clear winner in general. So I think it's very nice
that you have added support for D to premake. So we then have SCons
(build and configuration), CMake (configuration and several build
tools via generators), rdmd (can generate dependencies for Makefile),
Jacob as a build tool and there are several others specifically for D
and premake.
I'm not sure about the state of each of these. But SCons and CMake
work with dmd (both do configuration). premake is also configuration.
Regarding build tools I wonder how important they are. make works
fairly well.
Jens
The reasons I chose premake were primarily:
1. No external dependencies (lua embedded in an executable)
2. Simple configuration
3. Cross platform
4. Generates native build scripts: make, VS, Code::Blocks etc etc
I have to point out that I have only added DMD+make support as that is
all I needed at the time, but have plans (who doesn't :-D) to add
support for LDC, GDC, and other build chains.
I've considered doing this several times in the past. Managing the
makefiles in Derelict has been a PITA, to say the least. Thanks for
sharing this!
