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.
TL;DR: you can use to build your dub project and it'll be faster
and not rebuild the whole thing if you only change one module**.
Highlights of this release:
When dinosaurs roamed the Earth, `dmd -makedeps` didn't work so
to automatically handle dependencies between D modules reggae had
to wrap the compiler with a binary named `dcompile`. This would
call the compiler with `-v`, get the imports from the output, and
use them to only rebuild what was necessary. Now that `dmd
-makedeps` got fixed, the extra complication (and time to build
the extra binary) is gone.
Default dub builds are much faster now. Before, reggae would
create a reggaefile.d if one didn't exist for dub projects. I got
tired of waiting for the compiler, and realised that I don't
actually have to compile D code on-the-fly if I know ahead of
time what the code is anyway. Now, reggae immediately*** spits
out the build files for such projects.
Automatically detect when new files are added/deleted: this is
the main reason that the CMake devs erroneously advise people to
not use "globs" to just "give me all the source files". The issue
is when the file list changes, you need to remember to rerun the
metabuild system to detect the filesystem changes. No more:
reggae builds now rerun reggae when files are added or deleted.
Tup, of course, has always done this but it's the only one I know
of that did.
Before, if the compiler binary changed, then... oops it was if
you rebuilt in between updating your distro. Now the object files
depend on the compiler binary.
* Or Python, Ruby, Javascript, or Lua.
** Unless you made every module depend on every other module, in
which case, don't do that.
** dub can be slow to start up. Slows for me is ~200ms.
