[Scons-dev] D and default tools selection (Was: Scons 2.3.2 regression, D tool...)

[anatoly techtonik]

Cleaning up the thread mess by splitting discussions into several
branches.

On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 3:23 PM, Russel Winder <russel at winder.org.uk> wrote:
> On Sat, 2014-08-09 at 01:12 +0300, anatoly techtonik wrote:
>>
>> > I'm open for a discussion and would like to hear other ideas. My way to fix
>> > this would be:
>> >
>> > - D tools shouldn't be loaded by default, but get an optional tool ( ->
>> > tools=['default', 'dmd'] is mandatory). It's not enough to say "Let's try to
>> > detect them, and load them automatically.", as long as the "STATIC_SHARED"
>> > flag gets set to a fixed value. An option would be to use env.Default() to
>> > set this flag, but I don't know if D can then cope with a possible setting
>> > of "1" (Russel?).
>>
>> +1 on disabling it by default for the performance reasons listed here
>> https://bitbucket.org/scons/scons/commits/b757fe34f9fe#chg-src/engine/SCons/Tool/__init__.py
>
> Which is an argument for getting rid of Fortran, C++ and C, and also
> LaTeX, actually all the tools, from begin loaded by default.

Hell no. C and C++ should be present, and the arguments is this:
https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY-of-Programming-Language
and this:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Popularity of D is 0.228%. Less one 1 in 300 people will find that
default support for D is an improvement. All others will experience
additional startup time delay up to 0.1 second, which is a lot given
how many tools we check already.

So I am for disabling all unpopular tools until we have "on demand
tool initialization" in place. Although I not pushing for that.

-- 
anatoly t.