[cfe-dev] [libcxx] build system questions

[Michael Spencer]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 9:06 AM, Howard Hinnant <hhinnant at apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Dec 6, 2010, at 7:01 AM, sashan wrote:
>
>> On Mon Dec  6 03:18:23 2010, Chandler Carruth wrote:
>>>   On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 3:05 AM, sashan <sashan at zenskg.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Of course, that does not solve the dependency problem, but at least
>>>     I
>>>>> did not experience any problems with .dylib afterwards.
>>>>
>>>> On the dependency-checking issue: A The build time is currently about
>>>     a minute.
>>>> Imho this does not rise to the level of needing dependency checking to
>>>     speed
>>>> things up. A That being said, if someone wants to add dependency
>>>     checking and
>>>> it /does/ result in a speedup, I'd welcome it. A One requirement:
>>>     A The list of
>>>> headers and sources must be implicit. A I dislike explicit lists
>>>     because they
>>>> seem to me a continual source of errors.
>>>
>>>     Yeah I can look into this. What are your thoughts on using
>>>     autoconf/automake for this?
>>>     The 'parent' projects clang and llvm use them.
>>>
>>>   For reference, they don't use automake, and autoconf is one of the most
>>>   painful constructs ever devised in the realm of build systems. I would
>>>   want evidence of a very large problem indeed before solving it with
>>>   autoconf, and there doesn't seem to be one currently.
>>
>> I don't really care for the autotools stuff either. I suggested it because it
>> was in use by the parent projects and it's widely used in other projects.
>
> As soon as things get either expensive to build, or complicated to configure, I'm going to rebel.  But if things stay fast and simple, I'm ok.  I'd much rather have fast, simple and primitive, than slow, complicated and complex.
>
> I think we should start out with a simple question:  What problem are we attempting to solve?
>
> -Howard

If we want Windows support (which I do :P), CMake is the way to go.
I'm willing to do it, targeting POSIX-like platforms for now, as doing
a Windows port is a much larger project. It's also possible to do it
without requiring explicit source lists, even though there aren't that
many to begin with.

- Michael Spencer