Leandro Lucarella wrote:
I think in D you can do the same level of incremental compilation as in C/C++ but is not as natural. For one, in D is not natural to separate declarations from definitions, so a file in D tends to be dependent in *many* *many* other files because of excessive imports, so even when you can do separate compilation, unless you are *extremely* careful (much more than in C/C++ I think) you'll end up having to recompile the whole project even you change just one file because of the dependency madness.
That's why dmd can *automatically* generate .di files. But still, even writing .di files by hand cannot be any harder than writing a C++ .h file.
I know you can do separate compilation as in C/C++ writing the declarations in a different file, or generating/using .di files, but also you'll probably end up using libraries that don't do that (as somebody mentioned for C++ + STL) and end up in a dependency madness anyway. It's just not natural to do so in D, it even encourages not doing it as one of the main advertised features is you don't have to separate declarations from definitions. And I'm not saying that is an easy to solve problem, I'm just saying that I agree D doesn't scale well in terms of incremental compilations for big projects, unless you go against D natural way on doing things.
In no case is it worse than C++, and as soon as you import a file more than once you're faster.
