Addition of a build system generator

[elfring]

I suggest to reuse a higher level build system than your current make script so that powerful checks for software features will become easier.

• CMake
• Autotools

[bakpakin]

I used to have a CMake script for building Janet, which I then deleted as it was annoying to maintain and less flexible than a Makefile. I found CMake to not really be an improvement for portability. I do miss the easy development on Windows with visual studio, but a batch file works fine too.

A supplementary CMakeLists.txt for building would be useful, but not really on my roadmap.

[elfring]

How do you think about to support more development environments by the reuse of build system generators?

[bakpakin]

Build system generators are nice sometimes, but don’t really help with making things truly cross platform, they just smooth out the easiest step. Since I do most of the development for Janet in vim on Linux and occasionally Notepad++ on windows, IDE support is not so important to me.

Lastly, Janet has a bootstrap step that requires somewhat complicated rules. The CMake build, even before when it was simpler, required several custom commands to embed files in the binary.

Again, a CMake based build would be great and definitely help developers who wanted to use an IDE contribute, but not on my Roadmap. As for making Janet cross platform, I don’t think a build system generator is all that much help besides setting a handful of compiler flags, especially as Janet has basically no dependencies besides some basic Posix stuff and win32 on windows. Possibly pthreads in the future.

[elfring]

Does a tool like “autoscan” show any software dependencies that you find worth for further considerations?

[bakpakin]

No.