Announcing OMake 0.9.8.3; pre-announcing OMake 0.9.9 with automated C library wrapping for OCaml

Announcing OMake 0.9.8.3; pre-announcing OMake 0.9.9 with automated C library wrapping for OCaml

[Aleksey Nogin]

We are proud to announce the latest release of the OMake Build System - 
OMake 0.9.8.3 ("stable") and pre-announce that OMake 0.9.9 ("unstable") 
is expected to be released within a week.

OMake is a build system designed for scalability and portability. It 
uses a syntax similar to make utilities you may have used, but it 
features many additional enhancements, including the following.

   - Support for projects spanning several directories or directory
     hierarchies.

   - Fast, reliable, automated, scriptable dependency analysis using MD5
     digests, with full support for incremental builds.

   - Fully scriptable, includes a library that providing support for
     standard tasks in C, C++, OCaml, and LaTeX projects, or a mixture
     thereof.

     Often, a configuration file is as simple as a single line

     .DEFAULT: $(OCamlProgram prog, foo bar baz)

     which states that the program "prog" is built from the files foo.ml,
     bar.ml, and baz.ml. This one line will also invoke the default
     standard library scripts for discovering implicit dependencies in
     OCaml files.

   - Full native support for rules that build several files at once.

   - Portability: omake provides a uniform interface on Linux/Unix
     (including 64-bit architectures), Win32, Cygwin, Mac OS X, and other
     platforms that are supported by OCaml.

   - Built-in functions that provide the most common features of programs
     like grep, sed, find, and awk. These are especially useful on Win32.

   - Active filesystem monitoring, where the build automatically restarts
     whenever you modify a source file. This can be very useful during
     the edit/compile cycle.

   - A built-in command-interpreter osh that can be used interactively.

OMake preserves the style of syntax and rule definitions used in 
Makefiles, making it easy to port your project to OMake. There is no 
need to code in Perl (cons), or Python (scons). However, there are a few 
things to keep in mind:

  1. Indentation is significant, but tabs are not required.
  2. The OMake language is functional: functions are first-class and
     there are no side-effects apart from I/O.
  3. Scoping is dynamic.

OMake is licensed under a mixture of the GNU GPL license (OMake engine 
itself) and the MIT-like license (default configuration files).

Additional information and extensive documentation can be found on OMake 
Home Page at http://omake.metaprl.org/

OMake version 0.9.8.3 is a minor feature enhancements and bugfixes 
release. The changes in this version include:

   - Made it easy to define default ("implicit") rules for phony targets.
   - Detect case-insensitive filesystems on Unix-like operating systems
     (especially important under Mac OS X).
   - A number of performance improvements.
   - Documentation improvements.

For a more verbose change log, please visit 
http://omake.metaprl.org/changelog.html#0.9.8.3 .

Source and binary packages of OMake 0.9.8.3 may be downloaded from 
http://omake.metaprl.org/download.html . In addition, OMake may be 
obtained via the GODI packaging system.

To try it out, run the command "omake --install" in a project directory, 
and modify the generated OMakefile.

Even though we call it "stable", OMake 0.9.8.3 should still be 
considered an alpha release. While we have made an effort to ensure that 
it is bug-free, it is possible some functions may not behave as you 
would expect. Please report any comments and/or bugs to the mailing list 
omake@metaprl.org and/or at http://bugzilla.metaprl.org/

OMake 0.9.9 will feature a large number of major changes that Jason 
Hickey have been working on for the last two years. These changes include:

  * Completely redesigned variable naming semantics aimed at making sure
    that similarly named unrelated variables from different source
    files do not clash.

  * Optional ("keyword") arguments to functions.

  * An option to use an alternative "programming-language-style" syntax,
    where all string constants have to be quoted, but variable and
    function references do not have to use the $(...) syntax.

  * Dynamic loading of C libraries, including:

    - Tools for automated creation of OCaml wrappers to C libraries by
      parsing the C header files.

    - As an example, _automatically generated_ OCaml and OMake wrappers
      for the GTK library.

       - As a demo for the above, an OMake GUI capable of presenting a
         browseable dependency tree, and much more.

  * And many other features (much more complete and detailed list will
    accompany the release).

-- 
Aleksey Nogin, Research Scientist
Advanced Technologies Department, Information & System Sciences Lab
HRL Laboratories, LLC, Malibu, CA