Gor Gyolchanyan Wrote: > I had a few thoughts about integrating build awareness into DMD. > It would be really cool to add a flag to DMD to make it compile and > link in all import-referenced modules. > Also, it would be awesome to store basic build information in modules > themselves in the form of special comments (much like documentation > comments), where one could specify external build dependencies, output > type, etc. > There would be no need for makefiles and extra build systems. You'd > just feed an arbitrary module to the compiler and the compiler would > build the target, to which that module belongs (bu parsing build > comments and package hierarchies). > Wouldn't this be a good thing to have?
Take a look at Cabal and ghc-pkg/ghc --make from Haskell. I've been thinking about starting to put together something like this, but I haven't found the motivation to do it. This type of package management and build integration would go a long way to making D less decentralized. One thing that would be needed to complete such a system is proper support for linking shared libraries (at least on Linux). There are a bunch of things the build system could do that would make development in D much easier. If you're interested in doing this, you should contact me on the IRC channel.