Re: [jamboost] Re: [scons-devel] SCons BOF at O'Reilly OSCon 2003

From: Vladimir Prus (ghost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-06-18 02:14:28

David Abrahams wrote:
> Vladimir Prus <ghost_at_[hidden]> writes:
> >> (BTW, are you guys aware that Ralf W. Grosse-Kunstleve is already using
> >> or shipping Boost, I believe, with an SCons-based build system for
> >> cctbx, his Computational Crystallography ToolBox? I guess he has about
> >> twenty lines of Python code that parse up the .jam or .bjam or whatever
> >> files and turn them into calls into the SCons build engine. Might be a
> >> useful starting point to look at how someone else has done some of the
> >> basic stuff.)
> >
> > Need to look. Since Python version of Boost.Build is only distant
> > plan for now, we'd have a lot of Jam code by the time it
> > works. Another alternative I was thinking about was extending Python
> > with Jam. So, you'd have Python function "compile_jam_file", or
> > something.
>
> That sounds like we'd be giving up many/most of the advantages of
> Python. Consider Jam's poor data abstraction capability. We
> wouldn't even be able to touch regular Python classes.

I'm not sure what you mean. My intention was that Jamfiles could remain as is, 
but the rest of the system could be rewritten in Python. So Jamfiles will 
really be calling Python rules from Boost.Build --- like "exe" or "lib".

Jamfiles won't be able to use anything sophisticated --- like declaring new 
generators, or main target types. Such code would have to be rewritten. But 
supposedly, it's only small fraction of code, compared with Jamfiles.

- Volodya