The thing that I am confused about is: why does it have to be a
feature of the compiler?

If folks want a build system for toy examples that works with a single
command line, there's nothing stopping you from doing it. In fact, you
could even wrap an existing build system into a convenient script that
generates a project from the files given and then invokes the
configure and build steps.

Why do we need to coerce compilers into playing this role?

Em qua., 20 de abr. de 2022 às 07:42, Boris Kolpackov via SG15
<sg15_at_[hidden]> escreveu:
>
> Peter Dimov <pdimov_at_[hidden]> writes:
>
> > [...] and
> >
> > import <mylib/myheader.hpp>;
> >
> > working without a build system wouldn't be that bad either.
>
> Would you be prepared to wait a potentially significant time
> while the compiler builds (likely serially) BMIs for this
> header unit and any other header units and/or named modules
> that could be imported, transitively (while dumping all those
> BMIs on your disk somewhere)?
>
> In a way, it might be cleaner for a build system to provide
> the "compiler driver" mode rather than for the compiler to
> provide the "build system" mode. Plus the build system will
> give you some parallelism (e.g., for building named modules).
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