I have some old D code and I wanted to improve its build system: that code was using a .bat and shell script with dmd, manually listing all the .d files to be linked! Don't ask me why I didn't use at least a Makefile, I don't recall, this is quite old code.

What would you currently recommend to build a not very big D codebase?

(if you use just dmd / rdmd, to not depend on another tool, *how* do you use it?)

--
Luís

On Wednesday, 24 July 2013 at 12:24:26 UTC, Luís Marques wrote:
> I have some old D code and I wanted to improve its build system: that code was using a .bat and shell script with dmd, manually listing all the .d files to be linked! Don't ask me why I didn't use at least a Makefile, I don't recall, this is quite old code.
>
> What would you currently recommend to build a not very big D codebase?
>
> (if you use just dmd / rdmd, to not depend on another tool, *how* do you use it?)
>
> --
> Luís

If code amount is relatively small (and building does not involve calling any external tools), I'd stick with rdmd.
`rdmd --build-only <any dmd flags here> main.d` and let it figure out all imports.

On 2013-07-24 14:34, Dicebot wrote:

> If code amount is relatively small (and building does not involve
> calling any external tools), I'd stick with rdmd.
> `rdmd --build-only <any dmd flags here> main.d` and let it figure out
> all imports.

I use rdmd as well. I'm using two shell script, one to build the application and one to run it. Looking something like this:

#!/bin/sh

## Choose the compiler to use, if DVM is available
if [ -s "$HOME/.dvm/scripts/dvm" ] ; then
    . "$HOME/.dvm/scripts/dvm" ;
    dvm use 2.063.2
fi

## Compile the file containing the main function, in this case main.d
rdmd --build-only -ofbin/main "$@" main.d

And then the script for running:

#!/bin/sh

# Build the application
./build.sh

# Run the application if the build succeeded
if [ "$?" = 0 ] ; then
  ./bin/main "$@"
fi

The "$@" allows to pass in arguments to the compiler when building and arguments to the application when running.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Wednesday, 24 July 2013 at 12:24:26 UTC, Luís Marques wrote:
> I have some old D code and I wanted to improve its build system: that code was using a .bat and shell script with dmd, manually listing all the .d files to be linked! Don't ask me why I didn't use at least a Makefile, I don't recall, this is quite old code.
>
> What would you currently recommend to build a not very big D codebase?
>
> (if you use just dmd / rdmd, to not depend on another tool, *how* do you use it?)
>
> --
> Luís

This may be more than you need if your code base is very small, but this build system looks promising for medium sized and up code base. Worth a look if you plan to expand, or have mixed in C/C++ code.

Bottom-up-build (bub)
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/kqfvts$2ut8$1@digitalmars.com

--rt