[Sue D. Nymme]

I vastly prefer unix/linux, but there are times and places (e.g. work) where I must use Windows. I generally use cygwin to make my life bearable.

D turns out to be a real pain the the @** to get working in a Windows/Cygwin environment.

First, one good thing: gdc is available as a stock package from cygwin setup. Bad: it's from June 2005. I started running into problems when I tried to generate documentation from embedded comments.

(Here's another gripe: NONE of the pages that I found -- on dsource.org, the wiki, or digitalmars -- describing embedded documentation said anything about how to generate the output from the source. None!)

What was the problem with gdc and documentation? It took me over an hour to find this: "Built into the language is support for embedded documentation comments (called Ddoc), however at this stage, only the compiler supplied by DigitalMars implements a documentation generator." Great.

So I went looking for dmd. DMD comes pre-compiled for Win32, but I want to use it under cygwin. So (since there is apparently no precompiled binary for cygwin), I have to build it myself. This was a disaster. First, the source is included with a bare-bones readme.txt which says nothing about how to compile it. There is no makefile, no autoconf, no readme.cygwin. Passing any of the .c files through gcc resulted in scores of errors.

So I gave up on that. Figured I'd install the Win32 binaries... I guess I can use those to generate the documentation, while using gdc for actual development. Clumsy, but maybe it'll work. I wanted to put things into \Program Files\d, but I found this in the readme: "Do not install into a subdirectory with spaces, tabs, + signs, commas, or # characters in the subdirectory or path names." From the looks of things, the linker will only be happy if it's installed in \dm, and the compiler will only be happy if it's installed in \dmd.

Is there a better way? Or is this the sort of stuff I have to live with to do D in the Windows world?
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"If anyone finds the above offensive, I am prepared not only to retract it, but also to deny under oath that I ever said it." -- Tom Lehrer

[Sue D. Nymme]

I apologize; I thought this forum was for discussing D build tools in general; I didn't realize it was for a specific build tool.

My rant is more appropriate in the general D discussion, and I will post it there. Again, my apologies.
_________________
"If anyone finds the above offensive, I am prepared not only to retract it, but also to deny under oath that I ever said it." -- Tom Lehrer

[Derek Parnell]

[hasan]

What's the problem with just using the command line dmd on windows? isn't that how you do things on linux??! what is so troublesome about it? I don't get it.