Re: [Caml-list] One build system to rule them all?

[Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de>]

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Am Mittwoch, den 10.09.2014, 15:56 -0400 schrieb Sebastien Mondet:

> 
> - omake did that with yet another obscure and weird language (I guess
> the goal was to "look" like `make` but with even more broken string
> escaping).

omake has at least a working, powerful and quite clean model of
dependencies, and the build rules for the supported languages (like
OCaml) are read from OMakefiles and are not hard-coded. There was some
excellent analysis how to achieve this. I also think that the omake
language is a bit obscure as language. It's a dynamic functional
language that tries to do too much; you can run code as functions, as
statements, and as commands, and all these three forms use a slightly
different syntax (I guess that's why you complain about broken string
escaping - it is sometimes confusing which syntactical rules are
applicable at a certain point in the code). I'd love when this part
would be dropped, and I could develop all the helper functionality for a
build directly in OCaml, enhanced by syntax extensions for running shell
commands and for entering build rules into the dependency tree. E.g. you
could have:

let variable = ...

let do_something() = ...

<:make<
file_to_create: file_dep1 file_dep2
    ./build_tool.sh $(variable)
    $(do_something())
>>

just to illustrate the idea of mixing several notations in the same
file. Every OMakefile could e.g. be understood as functor that takes an
environment with build rules and returns a new, extended environment.
Finally everything is combined and executed. (Too bad that I don't have
more time to work on something like this.)

Gerd



> - ocamlbuild and jenga picked the right language.
> 
>     - ocamlbuild's API is very limited, there is not even a clear way
> to replace all the crazy small files required everywhere (_tags,
> mllib, ...) with function calls within a myocamlbuild.ml plugin. It is
> also painfully slow.
> 
>     - Jenga is not for "normal" projects. It takes half-an-hour to
> build jenga itself, and it's dependency tree is not very portable. The
> API is very convoluted even for simple projects.
> 
> 
> Look at https://github.com/samoht/assemblage/ certainly going to in
> the right direction.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  
>         -- 
>         Peter Zotov
>         
>         
>         
> 
> 
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Gerd Stolpmann, Darmstadt, Germany    gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de
My OCaml site:          http://www.camlcity.org
Contact details:        http://www.camlcity.org/contact.html
Company homepage:       http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de
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