Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Wednesday, 27 September 2023 at 15:13:19 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: On Tuesday, 26 September 2023 at 16:17:34 UTC, Andrey Zherikov wrote: On Thursday, 21 September 2023 at 15:59:10 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: ... I got your point. Why does it have multiple languages (front-ends)? Is there anyone willing to write build script for C++ on JavaScript or Ruby, for example? I thought that if I built it people would come, but nah. Also why is it meta build system? Because I think that's a superior design. For instance, all the start up time dub has to spend on every build disappears. Why can't it just build by itself without calling external tools (make, ninja)? It can: https://github.com/atilaneves/reggae/blob/master/bootstrap.sh Fwiw I think it look interesting. Will try it
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Tuesday, 26 September 2023 at 16:17:34 UTC, Andrey Zherikov wrote: On Thursday, 21 September 2023 at 15:59:10 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: ... I got your point. Why does it have multiple languages (front-ends)? Is there anyone willing to write build script for C++ on JavaScript or Ruby, for example? I thought that if I built it people would come, but nah. Also why is it meta build system? Because I think that's a superior design. For instance, all the start up time dub has to spend on every build disappears. Why can't it just build by itself without calling external tools (make, ninja)? It can: https://github.com/atilaneves/reggae/blob/master/bootstrap.sh
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Thursday, 21 September 2023 at 15:59:10 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: ... I got your point. Why does it have multiple languages (front-ends)? Is there anyone willing to write build script for C++ on JavaScript or Ruby, for example? Also why is it meta build system? Why can't it just build by itself without calling external tools (make, ninja)? PS I tried to reach you out on Discord and LinkedIn but no response so far.
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Thursday, 21 September 2023 at 15:54:26 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: [snip] Yes, and I've done that, but it's not great. I'm going to add CMake support to reggae by making CMake export its compilation DB and importing that. Interesting.
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Thursday, 21 September 2023 at 13:38:30 UTC, Andrey Zherikov wrote: On Wednesday, 20 September 2023 at 21:19:22 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: Because we don't have one now. Using CMake for D is horrible, I would say just using CMake is horrible :-D But there are a lot of people using it (even myself) and they all are trapped with the language. Not anymore! ;) Have you looked as Meson, for example - it even has a [section about D](https://mesonbuild.com/D.html)? Yes, and even had to use it for D. I don't know what state it's in now, but it was pretty much unusable if one had dub dependencies which... is nearly always the case. I believe this is applicable to all build systems atm - they don't know what dub is and how to deal with it. Well, no, since reggae *does* know what dub is and uses it as a library. Then there's the language: I'd rather use D or Python. If anything, Meson's use case could be questioned just as well by "why another build language?". TBH I thought Meson uses python but just found out it's not. My bad. Just took a quick look at [known build tools](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_build_automation_software#Licensing_overview) and noticed that there are (at least) two build tools that have Python as a build language and support D: [SCons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCons#Major_features) and [Waf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waf_(build_system)#Features). Although I don't how well they support it. I'm aware of both and looked at them many, many, years ago. My whole comment was about the reasoning why we need new build system and can't improve existing one. dub, for starters, and the fact that `dub describe` doesn't work. Then there's building by D package, which isn't going to be easy anywhere else.
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Thursday, 21 September 2023 at 14:19:27 UTC, jmh530 wrote: On Wednesday, 20 September 2023 at 21:19:22 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: On Wednesday, 20 September 2023 at 15:24:52 UTC, Andrey Zherikov wrote: On Thursday, 7 September 2023 at 17:34:48 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: [...] Out of curiosity, why do we need one more build tool? Because we don't have one now. Using CMake for D is horrible, and none of the alternatives are that much better. Hand-written Makefiles are a nightmare and will never get dependencies right. dub isn't a build system, although it includes a very limited one that can't be extended. Want to build D and C++ [snip] You can call CMake with a pre-build command right? Would it make sense to add an example of that? Yes, and I've done that, but it's not great. I'm going to add CMake support to reggae by making CMake export its compilation DB and importing that. It also might make sense to include in the tests/projects folder an importC example (not sure it makes sense to include a CMake example there). That's a great idea, thanks!
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Wednesday, 20 September 2023 at 21:19:22 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: On Wednesday, 20 September 2023 at 15:24:52 UTC, Andrey Zherikov wrote: On Thursday, 7 September 2023 at 17:34:48 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: https://code.dlang.org/packages/reggae For those who don't know, reggae is a meta-build system for and in D. It's like CMake, if you replace their terrible language with D*. Like CMake, it can output make and ninja files. Unlike CMake, it can also output tup files and has its own binary generator in case the dependency on one of those programs is undesired. Also unlike CMake, it supports dub projects out-of-the-box by using dub as a library. Out of curiosity, why do we need one more build tool? Because we don't have one now. Using CMake for D is horrible, and none of the alternatives are that much better. Hand-written Makefiles are a nightmare and will never get dependencies right. dub isn't a build system, although it includes a very limited one that can't be extended. Want to build D and C++ [snip] You can call CMake with a pre-build command right? Would it make sense to add an example of that? It also might make sense to include in the tests/projects folder an importC example (not sure it makes sense to include a CMake example there).
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Wednesday, 20 September 2023 at 21:19:22 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: Because we don't have one now. Using CMake for D is horrible, I would say just using CMake is horrible :-D But there are a lot of people using it (even myself) and they all are trapped with the language. Hand-written Makefiles are a nightmare and will never get dependencies right. dub isn't a build system, although it includes a very limited one that can't be extended. I agree that dub is not a build tool, it's more a package manager. TBH I had the same thought - we should have "good" build tool for D that has D as a language. Since I have some experience with CMake and agree with a lot of people that it have horrible language, I thought it would be beneficial. But then I looked round and realized that it will be like this: In practice, this doesn't seem to happen with build systems. Instead each language ecosystem ends up using its own: CMake, Gradle, Rake, ... IMHO this does not prove that D must have its own build system. Have you looked as Meson, for example - it even has a [section about D](https://mesonbuild.com/D.html)? Yes, and even had to use it for D. I don't know what state it's in now, but it was pretty much unusable if one had dub dependencies which... is nearly always the case. I believe this is applicable to all build systems atm - they don't know what dub is and how to deal with it. Then there's the language: I'd rather use D or Python. If anything, Meson's use case could be questioned just as well by "why another build language?". TBH I thought Meson uses python but just found out it's not. My bad. Just took a quick look at [known build tools](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_build_automation_software#Licensing_overview) and noticed that there are (at least) two build tools that have Python as a build language and support D: [SCons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCons#Major_features) and [Waf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waf_(build_system)#Features). Although I don't how well they support it. My whole comment was about the reasoning why we need new build system and can't improve existing one. So I would expect more wide analysis and comparison [here](https://github.com/atilaneves/reggae#why), not just with CMake. My main concern is that if we create a brand new build tool, years later it might turn out that other existing tool got wide adoption for D so this project become abandoned and all efforts are thrown away.
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Wednesday, 20 September 2023 at 21:19:22 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: Then there's the language: I'd rather use D or Python. Someone, somewhere, almost 20 years ago ... https://forum.dlang.org/post/40bb3d47.9030...@inwind.it In the D land, everything always changes, to never really change ... it's really a big wheel, or better a pendulum! :-P /Paolo
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Wednesday, 20 September 2023 at 15:24:52 UTC, Andrey Zherikov wrote: On Thursday, 7 September 2023 at 17:34:48 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: https://code.dlang.org/packages/reggae For those who don't know, reggae is a meta-build system for and in D. It's like CMake, if you replace their terrible language with D*. Like CMake, it can output make and ninja files. Unlike CMake, it can also output tup files and has its own binary generator in case the dependency on one of those programs is undesired. Also unlike CMake, it supports dub projects out-of-the-box by using dub as a library. Out of curiosity, why do we need one more build tool? Because we don't have one now. Using CMake for D is horrible, and none of the alternatives are that much better. Hand-written Makefiles are a nightmare and will never get dependencies right. dub isn't a build system, although it includes a very limited one that can't be extended. Want to build D and C++ code in the same project? Hah, good luck. TBH I had the same thought - we should have "good" build tool for D that has D as a language. Since I have some experience with CMake and agree with a lot of people that it have horrible language, I thought it would be beneficial. But then I looked round and realized that it will be like this: In practice, this doesn't seem to happen with build systems. Instead each language ecosystem ends up using its own: CMake, Gradle, Rake, ... Have you looked as Meson, for example - it even has a [section about D](https://mesonbuild.com/D.html)? Yes, and even had to use it for D. I don't know what state it's in now, but it was pretty much unusable if one had dub dependencies which... is nearly always the case. Then there's the language: I'd rather use D or Python. If anything, Meson's use case could be questioned just as well by "why another build language?".
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Thursday, 7 September 2023 at 17:34:48 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: https://code.dlang.org/packages/reggae For those who don't know, reggae is a meta-build system for and in D. It's like CMake, if you replace their terrible language with D*. Like CMake, it can output make and ninja files. Unlike CMake, it can also output tup files and has its own binary generator in case the dependency on one of those programs is undesired. Also unlike CMake, it supports dub projects out-of-the-box by using dub as a library. Out of curiosity, why do we need one more build tool? TBH I had the same thought - we should have "good" build tool for D that has D as a language. Since I have some experience with CMake and agree with a lot of people that it have horrible language, I thought it would be beneficial. But then I looked round and realized that it will be like this:  So I dropped that idea and think that investing into existing build tool to support D will be much more efficient. Have you looked as Meson, for example - it even has a [section about D](https://mesonbuild.com/D.html)?
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Friday, 15 September 2023 at 20:22:50 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
An argument could be made that it could/should install the
dependencies such that only one `-I` flag is needed.
Indeed, this would be god tier.
~190k SLOC (not counting the many dub dependencies) killed dmd
on a system with 64GB RAM + 64GB swap after over a minute. Even
if it worked, it'd be much, much slower.
What you do with the lines of code is *far* more important than
how many there are.
The arsd library has about 219,000 lines of text if you delete
the Windows-only and obsolete modules (doing so just so I can
actually dmd *.d here on my Linux box). This includes comments
and such; dscanner --sloc reports about 98,000.
$ wc *.d
218983 870208 7134770 total
$ dscanner --sloc *.d
total: 98645
Let's compile it all:
$ /usr/bin/time dmd *.d -L-L/usr/local/pgsql/lib -unittest
-L-lX11
5.35user 0.72system 0:06.08elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata
1852460maxresident)k
0inputs+70464outputs (0major+536358minor)pagefaults 0swaps
That's a little bit slow, over 5 seconds. About 1.3 of those
seconds are spent in the linker, the other 4 remain with dmd -c.
Similarly, that's almost 2 GB of RAM it used, more than it
probably should, but it worked fine.
My computer btw is a budget model circa 2016. Nothing
extraordinary about its hardware.
But notice it isn't actually running out of RAM or melting the
CPU over a period of minutes, despite being about six figures
lines of code but any measure.
On the other hand, compile:
enum a = () {
string s;
foreach(i; 0 .. 20_000_000_000)
s ~= 'a';
return s;
}();
Don't actually do it, but you can imagine what will happen. 6
lines that can spin your cpu and explode your memory. Indeed,
even just importing this module, even if the build system tried
not to compile it again, will cause the same problem.
The arsd libs are written - for the most part, there's some
exceptions - with compile speed in mind. If I see my build slow
down, I investigate why. Most problems like this can be fixed!
In fact, let's take that snippet and talk about it. I had to
remove *several* zeroes to make it even work without freezing up
my computer, but with a 100,000 item loop, it just barely worked.
Even 200,000 made it OOM.
But ok, a 100,000 item append:
0.53user 1.52system 0:02.17elapsed 95%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata
4912656maxresident)k
About 5 GB of RAM devoured by these few lines, taking 2 seconds
to run. What are some ways we can fix this? The ~= operator is
actually *awful* at CTFE, its behavior is quadratic (...or worse,
i didn't confirm this today, but it is obviously bad). So you can
fix this pretty easily:
enum string a = () {
// preallocate the buffer instead of append
char[] s = new char[](10);
foreach(ref ch; s)
ch = 'a';
return s;
}();
0.17user 0.03system 0:00.21elapsed 98%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata
45748maxresident)k 16inputs+1408outputs
(0major+21995minor)pagefaults 0swaps
Over 10x faster to compile, 1/100th of the RAM, ram result. Real
world code is frequently doing more than this example and
rewriting it to work like this might take some real effort
but the results are worth it.
And btw try this: import this module and check your time/memory
stats. Even if it isn't compiled, since ctfe is run when the
module is even just imported, you gain *nothing* by separate
compilation!
...but there are times when you can gain a LOT by separate
compilation in situations like this, if you can move the ctfe to
be some private thing not exposed in the interface. This requires
some work by the lib author too though in most cases. An example
where you can gain a lot is when something does a lot of internal
code generation but exposes a small interface, for example a
scripting language wrapper (though script wrappers can also be
made to compile reasonably efficiently if you use things like
preallocation of buffers, keep your generated functions short
(again, the codegen has quadratic behavior, so many small
functions work better than a big one, and if you factor the code
well, you can minimize the amount of generated code and call back
to generic things, e.g. type erasure), collapse template
instances, and keep ctfe things ctfe only with a variety of
techniques, so they are not codegened unless they are actually
necessary).
My arsd.script and arsd.cgi can wrap large numbers of functions
and classes reasonably well, but that's why programs using them
tend to be multi-second builds just note that's programs
using them. Separate compiling the libraries doesn't help. You'd
have to structure the code to keep those codegen parts internal
to a package with a minimal interface, then separate compiling
those internal components might win.
But this is a fairly niche case. Yes, I know there's one major
commercial D user who do exactly this. But that's the exception,
not the rule.
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Tuesday, 12 September 2023 at 13:17:50 UTC, Adam D Ruppe wrote: On Tuesday, 12 September 2023 at 13:12:29 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: It does mean adding `-I` flags to every dependency though, so there's that. Not if you install them properly. That's the job of the package manager does that. An argument could be made that it could/should install the dependencies such that only one `-I` flag is needed. Even then, I'm not sure how it'd handle different versions of the same package unless it did something like what Ikey showed at DConf. And for larger codebases `dmd -i` can't and won't work. Define "larger". ~190k SLOC (not counting the many dub dependencies) killed dmd on a system with 64GB RAM + 64GB swap after over a minute. Even if it worked, it'd be much, much slower.
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Tuesday, 12 September 2023 at 13:12:29 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: It does mean adding `-I` flags to every dependency though, so there's that. Not if you install them properly. And for larger codebases `dmd -i` can't and won't work. Define "larger".
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Monday, 11 September 2023 at 23:15:28 UTC, Adam D Ruppe wrote: I tried reggae today. It did not go well. http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2023_09_11.html#reggae-editorial One thing I learned from you is that for small projects `dmd -i` is just as fast as incremental compilation, which is rather surprising to me. It does mean adding `-I` flags to every dependency though, so there's that. And for larger codebases `dmd -i` can't and won't work.
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Thursday, 7 September 2023 at 17:34:48 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: https://code.dlang.org/packages/reggae You can use professional `xmake`, It's very convenient.
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
I tried reggae today. It did not go well. http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2023_09_11.html#reggae-editorial
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Thursday, 7 September 2023 at 17:34:48 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: https://code.dlang.org/packages/reggae For those who don't know, reggae is a meta-build system for and in D. It's like CMake, if you replace their terrible language with D*. Like CMake, it can output make and ninja files. Unlike CMake, it can also output tup files and has its own binary generator in case the dependency on one of those programs is undesired. Also unlike CMake, it supports dub projects out-of-the-box by using dub as a library. [...] I spent a some time getting a part of my project to build with Reggae & so far I am impressed, The partial compiles are really good, I am looking forward to switching! My largest complaint is that Reggae needs improvements to it's documentation, there was enough of it for me to get started and I can figure it out, but I do not feel that anyone can just jump right into using it. But this is not a unique problem especially with build systems, so this is a nitpick.
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Thursday, 7 September 2023 at 17:34:48 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: [...] Can reggae handle non-trivial dub builds with trees of dependencies? I gave it a quick test, following the examples in the readme, and the Makefile it generated looked for sources in the wrong place. It also didn't build the dependencies (nor even include their source directories as import paths). Maybe I'm doing it wrong.
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Thursday, 7 September 2023 at 21:25:27 UTC, German Diago wrote: On Thursday, 7 September 2023 at 17:34:48 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: https://code.dlang.org/packages/reggae For those who don't know, reggae is a meta-build system for and in D. It's like CMake... How mature is the build system? FWIW, I would like to stay in Meson if I can, since I use C++ also and that makes combining libs and other niceties easier. Mature enough that we've been using it at work for years now, but YMMV depending on what you use it for. It also supports C++ BTW.
Re: reggae v0.10.0 - The meta build system just got better
On Thursday, 7 September 2023 at 17:34:48 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: https://code.dlang.org/packages/reggae For those who don't know, reggae is a meta-build system for and in D. It's like CMake... How mature is the build system? FWIW, I would like to stay in Meson if I can, since I use C++ also and that makes combining libs and other niceties easier.
