Mate

Still not super stable but there are running tests for most platforms. It's already useable and should serve 99% of your builds as far as your manage dependencies.

About

Mate is a build system for C in C, and all you need to run it is a C compiler. If you want to learn more about it, check out our examples, which should teach you everything you need to know to use it.

Here is a simple example of a mate.c:

#define MATE_IMPLEMENTATION // Adds function implementations
#include "mate.h"

i32 main() {
  StartBuild();
  {
    Executable executable = CreateExecutable((ExecutableOptions){
        .output = "main",   // output name, in windows this becomes `main.exe` automatically
        .flags = "-Wall -g" // adds warnings and debug symbols
    });

    // Files to compile
    AddFile(executable, "./src/main.c");

    // Compiles all files parallely with samurai
    InstallExecutable(executable);

    // Runs `./build/main` or `./build/main.exe` depending on the platform
    RunCommand(executable.outputPath);
  }
  EndBuild();
}

To use it all you need is mate.h file on the same folder you have the mate.c example file and you can run by gcc ./mate.c -o ./mate && ./mate, after running once it will auto detect if you need to rebuild based on mate-cache.ini, so you can just run ./mate directly and it'll rebuild itself.

Under the hood we use Samurai, which is a ninja rewrite in C. We boostrapped it to mate.h, which compiles it on the first run. After that it is cached; thanks to this, builds are extremely fast (the first build usually takes a bit longer, but the second one should be very fast). If you want even faster builds, you can use TCC, which is a tinier and faster C compiler. On medium sized projects, our builds go from 600ms to 20ms because tcc was made to be very fast to compile.

Operating Systems

OS	Status	Notes
Linux	✅ Supported	Uses Samurai under the hood
Windows	✅ Supported	Requires Ninja build system (Samurai in progress)
MacOS	⚠️ Supported	Limited testing done
FreeBSD	✅ Supported	TCC is not stable on FreeBSD, use GCC or Clang(LLVM)

Compilers

Compiler	Status	Notes
GCC	✅ Supported	Primary development target with best support
Clang	✅ Supported	Works perfectly well too
TinyC	✅ Supported	Recommended if you want fast compile times
MSVC	⚠️ Supported	Limiting testing done, MinGW is recommended instead

Contributing

You wanna help out contributing? Great, read our contribution guidelines for information about the project and look into our TODOS or our issues to see what you would like to contribute on, documentation contributions are also welcomed :)

Acknowledgments

This project incorporates code from Samurai, which is primarily licensed under ISC license by Michael Forney, with portions under Apache License 2.0 and MIT licenses. The full license text is available in the LICENSE-SAMURAI.txt file.

Inspired from build.zig, nob.h, CMake and Meson build systems, aswell as other unrelated C libraries like raylib and clay.h in terms of interfaces and implementations.