Prerequesites
First you will need a few things before we get started with DDL.
Tango provides a very nice installer that sets up a complete tango development environment along with a D compiler. Please see the Tango download page (above link) for more information.
Next, you'll need one of the following:
The requirement for a build tool is really more for creating the binary utilities, which are in turn required for the various tutorials in this Wiki. While the DDL utils are not strictly required, they are strongly recommended. Of course, using a build tool is also recommended for your projects as well!
If building the DDL Utils doesn't appeal to you, the DDL Binary Utilities Bundle is also available for download separately.
If you are doing any deep hacking of DDL, or extending this library, you may want to work with DDL's build scripts. As these are UNIX BASH scripts, it is recommended that Windows users install the GNU Win32 utilities.
Finally, you'll need the actual DDL source:
Install Method 1: (recommended) DDL For All
The best way to install DDL is to extract it to your compiler's standard source tree. In the case of Tango, that is conveniently located under "<tango-install-dir>/import" This has the effect of making the ddl. namespaces accessible to all your applications, which can be a problem if you have other projects that use different versions of DDL. If you opt for this method, do so with care.
For creating the DDL Binary Utilities, you'll want to extract the utils/ DDL SDK directory elsewhere. Optionally, download the DDL Binary Utilities Bundle separately.
Install Method 2: The Easy Way
Another approach is to extract ddl/ as a subdirectory within your own project. This has the nice side-effect of making sure that other projects can use different versions of DDL, if need be.
Similar to the recommendation in method 1, you'll want to extract the entire SDK elsewhere should you want to build the utils bundle from scratch (or just download the DDL Binary Utilities Bundle separately).
Install Method 3: The Hard Way
Arguably, the most difficult way to install the SDK is to extract DDL to a separate place entirely, and be mindful of using the correct command-line options later on. Such options are beyond the scope of this tutorial - please refer to your compiler's reference for more information.
Installation of the DDL Binaries Bundle
The binary bundle contains several programs that make the development and debugging of DDL based programs easier. These executables can be installed anywhere you like. It is recommended that you place them in a directory on the system path (where your compiler executable is located perhaps).
Installation GNU Utilities for Win32
Installation of this .zip is very straight-forward, just install and put the following directories first in your PATH:
- <install-dir>/bin
- <install-dir>/usr/local/wbin
Placing these first is important since there's a find.exe in the /wbin directory above *and* Windows provides a find.exe in your /windows directory. By placing /usr/local/wbin first, you will have no trouble using the unix-style find command.