Re: [Boost-build] The future of B2?

Subject: Re: [Boost-build] The future of B2?
From: Raffi Enficiaud (raffi.enficiaud_at_[hidden])
Date: 2016-10-06 11:22:29

Le 06/10/16 à 17:03, Chambers, Matthew a écrit :
>
> [snip]
> The point about the build being tightly coupled to the IDE is sensible.
> I also have trouble imagining using b2 effectively from within many
> IDEs. I use Visual Studio as a code editor but I can't stomach using it
> as a build system for C++ for anything serious. It's too painful to have
> to go into the project dialog to change build settings, or a priori come
> up with all the combinations of build configurations that I may want to
> use and make them into Project Configurations. If I want to build a
> debug build with runtime-debugging=off, that is a piece of cake with b2,
> but probably would require making a new project configuration or editing
> an existing config in VS.

I would go for a better use of the configuration manager in VS (debug, 
release, runtime-debug=off etc) obviously driven by b2. Then I can think 
of something like

b2 runtime-debugging=on,off arch=x86,x64 ...

or inside a file declaring the matrix of configurations.

that would generate several configurations in VS directly. There should 
be something similar in Xcode and QtCreator.

I suppose if VS exposed common C++ properties
> (link, runtime-link, runtime-debugging, debug-symbols, optimization,
> inlining, asynch-exceptions) as easily accessible checkboxes in the IDE,
> then I would find it a lot easier to use.

This I think will be just painful, and this is why you also would like 
to use a tool like b2 or cmake to do this job for you. Most of the time, 
those configuration files are overkill in functionality and buried very 
deep so that this is hard to manage properly.

I'm curious how Rene plans to
> overcome that without following the CMake route (which I'm not very fond
> of either, but I suppose if b2 could do what CMake does and make VC
> project files, that might be useful).
>
> -Matt

Well, maybe we cannot avoid being completely orthogonal to cmake. b2 
integrates its own build system (which cmake obviously does not) and in 
that sense makes the tool as a potential replacement for many things. 
But if the user choose to use an IDE, then again it honour this usage 
fully rather than faking :) .

Raffi