Re: [Boost-build] [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] CMake Announcement from Boost Steering Committee?

Subject: Re: [Boost-build] [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] CMake Announcement from Boost Steering Committee?
From: Douglas Capeci (doug_capeci_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-08-14 16:22:47

On Aug 14, 2017, at 12:05 PM, Chambers, Matthew via Boost-build wrote:

> On 8/14/2017 10:10 AM, Douglas Capeci via Boost-build wrote:
>> I have found that most cMake advocates don't really understand how much better of a world Boost Build offers. They also have a hard time getting out of the dinosaur cave to give up the old arduous ways of maintaining complex Makefile based build systems to simply learn JAM. I would argue that the current cMake product front-end (and that is all it is...) is the result of cMake developers taking a hard and close look at Boost Build and understanding its elegance and superiority.
> I believe that CMake became popular in the open source community precisely because maintaining CMakefiles is very much like maintaining an autotools system Makefile, plus it also makes Visual C++ projects for native Windows support (cue applause). Switching to cmake, after using autotools for a long time, doesn't require rethinking what a build system should do.
The overcomplexity and slowness that GNU autotools flow has placed on our C++ software build system is exactly why we scrapped it for Boost Build. With Boost Build, our software build system is much smaller, faster, and is easily scalable to a standard compute grid engines. cMake does not offer these benefits that very large (>50M lines of code) C++ software systems demand.

The Boost Library has always been focused to provide the best solutions for C++ developers, and now it seems that this hard-core focus is beginning to diminish by trying to accommodate mixed language IDE tool environments which are really toys in the real-world.
> 
> Boost.Build could probably use a "Why Boost.Build instead of Makefiles?" motivational tutorial. My autotools-fu was never that great to begin with, so I wouldn't be the right one to write it, that's for sure.
> 
> As for existing Boost libs dropping support for Boost.Build, I'm not too concerned. I use Rene's boost-ext.jam extensions file and update it whenever I need a new lib from Boost, or updating Boost requires necessitates changes to it.
> 
> -Matt
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