Re: [Boost-build] wxWidgets support

From: Alex Besogonov (cyberax_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-15 05:07:38

Reece Dunn wrote:
> Alex Besogonov wrote:
>> Today I've finished wxWidgets.jam module. It wasn't easy, size of the 
>> wxWidgets.jam is now 40Kb (thanks to some wxWidgets idiosyncrasies) and 
>> lack of good documentation on BJam didn't help either.
> Cool! (If you could give more details as to what you found hard about 
> learning BJam/BBv2 this will help in collating user experiences to help 
> improve the documentation.)
First of all, Jam language syntax is weird, it's very hard to understand 
  what "result = $(result[1--2]) ;" or "$(.var:J="")" mean. Fortunately, 
I found a good enough language description in Perforce Jam documentation.

The next major problem is lack of good documentation on build process. 
In particular, it would be nice to have a detailed documentation on 
adding new generators and features. I had to read and trace a lot of 
BJam's source code.

BTW, it would be nice to have a "Hello, world!" example. I'd spent about 
an hour trying to find how to print a string!

>> Right now I have some questions:
>> 1. Is there any tool for code documentation (like Doxygen)?
> build/v2/tools/doxygen.jam :) There is also boostbook.jam that allows 
> you to write additional documentation around the doxygen reference docs. 
> (See libs/program_options/doc for an example). BoostBook is an XML 
> format that is an extension of DocBook.
> If you are not a fan of XML, you can use quickbook.jam which allows you 
> to write Wiki-style documentation that is converted to BoostBook (See 
> boost/tools/quickbook/doc for an example).
Thanks!

>> 2. Why <native-wchar_t> was removed?
> a.  The option is now explicitly set;
> b.  wchar_t is a standard C++98 data type;
But VC7.1 _still_ doesn't define it by default :)

> c.  mixing native-wchar_t and non-native-wchar_t code results in link 
> errors.
Yes, that's the reason I need it. wxWidgets is built without the native 
wchar_t by default, so users won't be able to use prebuilt wxWidgets on 
Windows without having to deal with raw compiler flags.

>> 3. Is there any support for reading property files (list of "name=value" 
>> strings)? I've built my own but I don't like it. 
> No. What do you want this functionality for?
wxWidgets stores some sensitive build information (like exceptions 
support or STL usage) in "build.cfg" file so I have to read it to set 
correct preprocessor definitions.

>> 4. What is the status of precompiled headers support?
> I have been investigating adding PCH support, but have been busy with 
> work and other things. I hope to have something in the next few weeks.
Great! I can live a few weeks with my ad-hoc implementation....

--
With respect,
	Alex Besogonov(cyberax_at_[hidden])