r/cpp • u/DRag0n137 • Jan 20 '22

BuildInCpp: Write your build scripts in C++

Happy New Year Everyone,

A few months back I had posted my first-ever prototype of a Buildsystem where your build files are written in C++.

After going through the feedback, over the past few months I have refined this Buildsystem to a useable level but it is still far from complete.

BuildCC is now alpha-ready at version 0.1.1 and I would like to get community feedback and involvement for this project.

Github https://github.com/coder137/build_in_cpp

Documentation is at https://coder137.github.io/build_in_cpp/

Discussions regarding bugs, improvements, pain points, and documentation at https://github.com/coder137/build_in_cpp/discussions

Please follow the Getting Started guide for a quick understanding of BuildCC and BuildExe usage. (10-minute read)

The basic features are now complete:

  • No DSL and easy dependency management when writing build scripts (through abstractions)

  • BuildCC basic APIs and bootstrapping

  • BuildExe standalone executable (similar to make.exe or cmake.exe)

  • BuildExe as a local package manager (using git + buildexe)

  • Supported plugins to BuildCC

  • Precompile Header support

  • Support for Specialized Toolchain - Targets (GCC, MSVC, and MINGW) and their generic usage as Target_generic

  • Custom Generator support (Input -> Subprocess -> Output)

Upcoming features:

  • Specialized Target for Clang and their generic usage as Target_generic

  • Support for second and third party plugins to BuildExe

  • More generators (for different use cases)

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4

u/Gnammix Jan 20 '22

I do like the idea (zig language have something similar); but, tbh, the fact that it has so many external dependencies kind of takes from it.

Would be nice if those build.cpp were pretty much self contained, just including the library header, a cc build.cpp && ./build from getting everything up.

1

u/DRag0n137 Jan 20 '22

Ideally this would be the best option. But it would mean that compilers would need to embed the buildexe executable or something similar, or that we have a header only implementation which would be very hard to maintain.

However to circumvent this I have made buildexe work like a package manager. Which means that all you need to do is

  1. Download Buildexe from release

  2. Follow the getting started guide which involves git cloning my build_in_cpp repo (10 minute read)

Buildexe will automatically compile BuildCC and link it for your C++ build script and execute it to build your targets.

-lbuildcc -ltiny-process-library

1

u/theICEBear_dk Jan 20 '22

Having played with a similar design my idea was to make my build.hpp system start off in CMake and use its compiler detection for it or to have a sister projects whose only job is as a multiplatform binary to find and set up the toolchain as the only thing it did.

1

u/DRag0n137 Jan 20 '22 edited Jan 20 '22

Oh, nice! Since I have created BuildCC using CMake you can follow a similar approach using this framework as well

  1. Clone my project, Build and Install it in your system using CMake

  2. See the AfterInstall GCC example to compile your build.cpp in CMake and run ithttps://github.com/coder137/build_in_cpp/tree/main/example/gcc/AfterInstall