Hi, I'd like to have a discussion about using CMake as a library from python, and by that I mean not writing CMakeLists.txt files, but python code that then uses the CMake generators and Find*.cmake in order to leverage both the power of CMake and Python.
First, a bit of background on the idea itself. I've used CMake since 2010 in different projects at work, and I love it. I'm the CMake guy at work, because most of the colleagues cannot be bothered with it. In fact I highly prefer doing the CMake maintenance myself, as most of the colleagues do not make any effort in trying to apply best practices of to factorize the code (which they do with the C++ code). When talking about CMake, the first reaction most of them have is about the language itself, because they don't know it, don't like some of the idioms, and have trouble accomplishing what they want with it. Nobody argues that CMake is awesome at generating either Visual Studio solutions or Unix Makefiles or whatever, but the language is a high barrier of entry. I have to admit that doing seemingly simple stuff can be a bit confusing in cmake, e.g. checking if the value of a variable is greater than another. Thus I thought that using a language that is well-known and has a closer syntax to what we are used to (not to mention we use python quite a bit for custom scripts) would greatly ease the maintenance of our buildsystem. This would allow for a few things that are not straightforward in cmake, such as functions that return a value. I prototyped around this idea these last weeks (a few minutes or hours at a time) and got it in a proof of concept state, where I cant do a add_library in python. I think this would be a great step forward for writing buildsystems, as lots of tasks would be greatly simplified. From the top of my mind: * reading files * writing files * downloading files * copying files (CMake's copy is not POSIX-compliant, as I learned recently when copying symbolic links) Also, the syntax could be made Object-Oriented very easily, as the python bindings will need a layer of abstraction. Now, for the technical realisation My prototype required a few modifications into CMake itself: * I added cmSystemTools::SetCMakeRoot, as the system root cannot be determined automatically using the current methods * cmLinkItem's typedef of std::string was made public because swig has trouble with it. There may be a better way to solve the problem, but this was the quickest for a POC * cmCacheManager::AddCacheEntry was made public, as cmake::Configure cannot be used from python (it check for the existence of a CMakeLists.txt file, which does not exist in this scenario) and the cache variables it sets seem to be necessary. A cmake.i swig interface file, and a python file that does the initialization of CMake, and I have a simple library compiled. I will try to make a layer of abstraction on top of the python bindings before publishing this work on github, in order to show the syntactic sugar python can provide, but I will publish this before if anybody is interested in working on this. Now, does anyone beside me think this is a good idea ? Cheers
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