I am pleased to finally announce the build system I've been
slowly working on for over a year in my spare time:
Docs: http://jasonwhite.github.io/button/
Source: https://github.com/jasonwhite/button
Features:
- Correct incremental builds.
- Automatic dependency detection (for any build task, even shell
scripts).
- Build graph visualization using GraphViz.
- Language-independent. It can build anything.
- Can automatically build when an input file is modified (using
inotify).
- Recursive: It can build the build description as part of the
build.
- Lua is the primary build description language.
A ton of design work went into this. Over the past few years, I
went through many different designs and architectures. I finally
settled on this one about a year ago and then went to work on
implementing it. I am very happy with how it turned out.
Note that this is still a ways off from being production-ready.
It needs some polishing. Feedback would be most appreciated (file
some issues!). I really want to make this one of the best build
systems out there.
Here is an example build description for DMD:
https://github.com/jasonwhite/dmd/blob/button/src/BUILD.lua
I'd say that's a lot easier to read than this crusty thing:
https://github.com/dlang/dmd/blob/master/src/posix.mak
In fact, there is some experimental support for automatic
conversion of Makefiles to Button's build description format
using a fork of GNU Make itself:
https://github.com/jasonwhite/button-make
Finally, a few notes:
- I was hoping to give a talk on this at DConf, but sadly my
submission was turned down. :'(
- I am aware of Reggae, another build system written in D.
Although, I admit I haven't looked at it very closely. I am
curious how it compares.
- You might also be interested in the two other libraries I wrote
specifically for this project:
- https://github.com/jasonwhite/darg (A command-line parser)
- https://github.com/jasonwhite/io (An IO streams library)
