make.cpp

Yet another build system for C++.
This is a build system that uses cpp to build cpp project. It is highly customizable and is designed with support for C++20 modules in mind.

Installation

boost library is mandatory, this may change in the future

• Download the zip in release section.
• Extract all files into a folder. Think this folder as node_modules in js or site-packages in python. Assume the folder is named as packages.
• Set a env variable CXX_PACKAGES and set the value to packages.
• Add packages/makeDotCpp/bin into PATH.
• Follow the steps in Usage. The first build may be slow due to generation of BMI files for makeDotCpp.

Usage

The following steps maybe simplified in the future with make.cpp init command.
For now only clang compiler is supported to build build.cpp. This might change when global config file is supported.

• Create a file named project.json under your project.
  The project.json in this project is a good example of it. You can find the full description in src/project/ProjectDesc.cppm and src/project/Usage.cppm.
• Create a file named build.cpp (This can be controlled through dev.buildFile in project.json).
• Add a function:

  import makeDotCpp.dll.api;
  
  using namespace makeDotCpp;
  using namespace api;
  
  extern "C" int build(const ProjectContext &ctx) {
  
  };

• The ProjectContext will provide all information you will need. You can find the definition in src/dll/api.cppm.
• The build.cpp in this project is a good example of how to use makeDotCpp to build a project, however if you want you can build the project as you wish.
• Simply type make.cpp to init a build. More options can be found in make.cpp --help.

Notice

• All build files and global packages will be build with flags -march=native -std=c++20 -Wall. Because the artifacts are not supposed to be shared with others.
• For now only clang is supported to build build.cpp and global packages. However, the project may be compiled with other compilers, to do this, you need to inherit from Compiler class in makeDotCpp.compiler to create your own compiler implementation. Compile it as a dll and put the dll under packages/.global/compiler. Then you may use make.cpp --compiler <The name of dll> to build a project.
• cmake and other build system compatibility is not yet implemented. However, to use a package from other build system, you may look at src/builder/Export.cppm to create your own implementations.

Credits

• boost library
• glob