Re: A proposal for a modern build-system

From: Rainer Deyke (rdeyke_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-03-22 12:34:03

On 21.03.24 18:34, Hassan Sajjad via Boost wrote:
> I developed the build-system HMake https://github.com/HassanSajjad-302/HMake.
> It is in C++ and MIT Licenced. It supports drop-in header-files to
> header-units replacement. While compilers support processing a header-file
> as header-unit, no other build-system supports this feature.

My experience with existing build systems is that they all suck.  I 
currently have my own ad-hoc build system written in Python, and I'd 
love to be able to drop it, especially since my own system is currently 
also unable to build C++ modules, but none of the existing build systems 
I tried were able to meet my needs.  I am therefore interested in a new 
build system in principle, but also extremely picky about which build 
systems I am interesting in.

In terms of what my build system does, actually compiling the C++ source 
files is the easiest 1%.  The hard parts are building libraries, 
processing data files, and packaging the complete project for 
distribution.  Some more specific requirements:

  - Builds should be hermetic.  Compiling the same project with the same 
command-line arguments on different computers should result in 
bit-for-bit identical results.  (I currently handle this by compiling in 
a Docker container.)
  - I want to build for multiple target operating systems on one 
computer, from one source directory, with one invocation of the build 
system.
  - I don't like to edit my build specification files every time I add 
or remove a file, so I use wildcards extensively in specifying which 
source files to build.
  - Some executables need to be built for the target platforms.  Some 
only need to be built for the build platform, so that I can run them as 
part of the build process.
  - The set of artifacts produced from one (data) source file is not 
known until the source file is processed.  (Example: unzipping a zip 
file as part of the process of building the library contained in the zip 
file.)

-- 
Rainer Deyke (rainerd_at_[hidden])