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.
