[Boost-build] bjam 4.0.. in C++

Subject: [Boost-build] bjam 4.0.. in C++
From: Rene Rivera (grafikrobot_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-05-22 09:57:05

Once upon a time I started thinking, investigating, sketching, and doing 
some minor coding for a rewrite of bjam in C++ to address the various 
problems. Mainly the horrible memory management and hence speed. 
Unfortunately at the time I had decided that it would not depend on 
Bosot libraries in the hope of preventing a rather nasty boot-strapping 
problem. This presented problems as I couldn't find any good 
lexer/parser that played nice with C++ and wasn't a big PITA to use. It 
also loomed on my how much of Boost I would end up writing anyway. So 
I've just about decided to abandon my assertion that a new bjam would 
not depend on Boost. But I thought I would ask for feedback on this 
before continuing down this path. The new plan would be to:

   * Have bjam 4 depend on a *released* version of Boost.
   * Written with Spirit as the base lexer/parser.
   * Have a variety of syntax improvements and support for UTF8/Unicode.

I'm cleaning up the branch where I started this work at the moment. But 
I'd like to hear ideas and comments on the new approach. And if you have 
feature request for such a rewrite now would be a good time to voice 
them, so we can add them to trac.

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