{"id":3578,"date":"2011-09-09T22:36:50","date_gmt":"2011-09-10T05:36:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/?p=3578"},"modified":"2012-04-13T19:15:47","modified_gmt":"2012-04-14T02:15:47","slug":"difficulty-building-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/difficulty-building-software\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s So Hard About Building?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I finally had a revelation as to why so building software can be so difficult– because build systems are typically built on programming languages that you don’t normally use<\/strong> in your day to day programming activities. If the project is simple enough, the build system usually takes care of the complexities. If there are subtle complexities — and there always are<\/em> — then you have to figure out how to customize the build system to meet your needs.<\/p>\n

First, there’s the Makefile. It’s easy to forget that the syntax which comprises a Makefile pretty well qualifies as a programming language. I wonder if it’s Turing-complete? But writing and maintaining Makefiles manually is arduous and many systems have been created to generate Makefiles for you. At the end of the day, running ‘make’ still requires the presence of a Makefile and in the worst case scenario, you’re going to have to inspect and debug what was automatically generated for that Makefile.<\/p>\n

So there is the widespread GNU build system<\/a>, a.k.a., “the autotools”, named due to its principle components such as autoconf and automake. In this situation, you have no fewer than 3 distinct languages at work. You write your general build instructions using a set of m4<\/a> macros (language #1). These get processed by the autotools in order to generate a shell script (language #2) called configure. When this is executed by the user, it eventually generates a Makefile (language #3).<\/p>\n

Over the years, a few challengers have attempted to dethrone autotools. One is CMake<\/a> which configures a project using its own custom programming language that you will need to learn. Configuration generates a standard Makefile. So there are 2 languages involved in this approach. <\/p>\n

Another option is SCons<\/a>, which is Python-based, top to bottom. Only one programming language is involved in the build system; there’s no Makefile generated and run. Until I started writing this, I was guessing that the Python component generated a Makefile, but no.<\/p>\n

That actually makes SCons look fairly desirable, at least if your only metric when choosing a build system is to minimize friction against rarely-used programming languages.<\/p>\n

I should also make mention of a few others: Apache Ant<\/a> is a build system in which the build process is described by an XML file. XML doesn’t qualify as a programming language (though that apparently doesn’t stop some people from using it as such<\/a>). I see there’s also qmake<\/a>, related to the Qt system. This system uses its own custom syntax.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I realized that build systems cause me so much trouble because they tend to impose unusual programming language requirements on me<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t