On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 10:18:29PM +0000, Atila Neves via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...] > If I were to write a build system today that had to spell out all of > its commands, I'd go with tup or Ninja. That CMake has support for > Ninja is the icing on the cake for me. I wrote a Ninja build system > generator the other day, that thing is awesome. [...] > P.S. I've thought of writing a build system in D, for which the > configuration language would be D. I still might. Right now, dub is > serving my needs.
I've been thinking of that too! I have in mind a hybrid between tup and SCons, integrating the best ideas of both and discarding the bad parts. For example, SCons is notoriously bad at scalability: the need to scan huge directory structures of large projects when all you want is to rebuild a tiny subdirectory, is disappointing. This part should be replaced by Tup-style OS file change notifications. However, Tup requires arcane shell commands to get anything done -- that's good if you're a Bash guru, but most people are not. For this, I find that SCon's architecture of fully-customizable plugins may work best: ship the system with prebaked rules for common tasks like compiling C/C++/D/Java/etc programs, packaging into tarballs / zips, etc., and expose a consistent API for users to make their own rules where applicable. If the scripting language is D, that opens up a whole new realm of possibilities like using introspection to auto-derive build dependencies, which would be so cool it'd freeze the sun. Now throw in things like built-in parallelization ala SCons (I'm not sure if tup does that too, I suspect it does), 100%-reproducible builds, auto-packaging, etc., and we might have a contender for Andrei's "winner" build system. > P.S.S autotools is the worse GNU project I know of +100! It's a system of hacks built upon patches to broken systems built upon other hacks, a veritable metropolis of cards that will entirely collapse at the slightest missing toothpick in your shell environment / directory structure / stray object files or makefiles leftover from previous builds, thanks to 'make'. It's pretty marvelous for what it does -- autoconfigure complex system-dependent parameters for every existing flavor of Unix that you've never heard of -- when it works, that is. When it doesn't, you're in for days -- no, weeks -- no, months, of hair-pulling frustration trying to figure out where in the metropolis of cards the missing toothpick went. The error messages help -- in the same way stray hair or disturbed sand helps in a crime investigation -- if you know how to interpret them. Which ordinary people don't. T -- Philosophy: how to make a career out of daydreaming.
