[email protected]May 6, 2022
What's your favorite/preferred build system? I really love the simplicity of POSIX make and Plan9's mk, but they do start to feel restrictive or at least unable to reasonably express some of the desires of modern development. On the other hand, GNU Make and CMake in particular feel like they have needlessly complex DSLs that hit a frustrating middle ground where they allow for some programmatic build rules, but still require lots of repitition.
Show thread[email protected]
Maybe I need to spend some time with BSD make to get a better handle on its extensions, but most of the magic there seems to come from the excellent work put into the build framework/library.
XMake sounds nicer than CMake, but unlikely to scratch the itch of a programmatic/programmable build system.
Ninja/Samurai seem awesome, but are meant to be generated rather than written.
May 6, 2022 at 12:06pmWeb
Show thread[email protected]May 6, 2022

I don't know if I'll ever have time to even build an MVP, but I think it'd be interesting to have a build system powered by some kind of #lisp, maybe Janet or some kind of #scheme, it'd still work on a DAG, like make, but maybe without the need for files to track targets.

Barely more than a thought right now, partly inspired by the proposed new build system for #racket, partly by the eldritch spaghetti I've worked with over the past ~1.5yrs. Definitely interested in hearing other thoughts.

Show threadHamMay 11, 2022

@architect I tried xmake for a while and really grew to appreciate its dependency management (xrepo). But, I swapped to premake for better cross-platform compatibility and a simpler API.

I’d like a build system written in something a little more human than Lua. C/C++ external tools feel needlessly complex when 90% of the time I just want to build all the files in my current path tree, tweak the optimize flags, and toggle between some linker settings.