Re: [boost] Scons users?

From: Andy Moreton (andy.moreton_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-09-20 13:52:38

On Tue, 20 Sep 2005 17:08:04 GMT, Edward Diener wrote:

> David Abrahams wrote:
>> Kevin Wheatley <hxpro_at_[hidden]> writes:
>> 
>> 
>>>David Abrahams wrote:
>>>
>>>>On the Boost.Build list we were just discussing the fact that some
>>>>people otherwise inclined towards Boost have chosen Scons over
>>>>Boost.Build.  It would be useful for us to understand some of the
>>>>reasons why, if some of you wouldn't mind letting us know.  No flames,
>>>>please!
>>>
>>>not a flame, but some test results (Noel Llopis' Blog) shows a few
>>>interesting results:
>>>
>>>http://tinyurl.com/7fdns (www.gamesfromwithin.com)
>>>
>>>These are updated from previously.
>> 
>> 
>> Wow, harsh.  The numbers aside, I think his commentary is rather
>> flame-ish.  
> 
> The speed of a build should hardly be the entire reason for determining 
> what build system to use, but it was the total reason for recommending 
> build systems in the article mentioned above.

Correctness comes first, but I think the article was reasonably fair. The 
author is trying to find a build system to solve a real-world problem. The 
requirements that it should be fast, simple to customise for other 
platforms and tools and perform as well on incremental builds as on full 
rebuilds seem a reasonable place to start. If the synthetic benchmark he 
uses seems unfair, please produce some constructive criticism as to how it 
can be made more realistic.

Returning to the title of the thread, the only things I've used BBv1 and 
BBv2 for are building Boost itself, and some toy projects (the exercises 
from the TMP book). Based on that (limited) experience, I would not 
consider [b]jam or BoostBuild for any serious work. Producing a language 
with more baroque and undebuggable syntax and semantics than 'make' takes 
some doing. 

I think that the effort expended on BBv1/BBv2 would have been far better 
spent on fixing the performance issues in scons.

            AndyM