Re: Premake vs. CMake

["Brandon Van Every" <bvanevery@...>]

On Feb 2, 2008 5:42 PM, Thiago Bastos <tabastos@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't have much experience with CMake or Premake, but my first impressions
> are that CMake's script is ugly as hell.

Meaning what, you don't like capital letters?
You don't like some_command(whatever blah blah blah) ?
You don't like typing set(foo blah) instead of foo=blah ?

>  I was not very impressed by CMake either. It obviously has an edge over
> Premake in terms of maturity and features, but I feel confident that a group
> of 2-3 advanced Lua users could design a superior build tool based on Lua
> (drawing ideas from Premake, SCons, CMake, qmake, etc.). I myself felt
> tempted to start such a project ;-)

Ok, what's the biggest build system you've worked on to date?  And,
what would your business model be?  The world isn't interested in the
work of a few Lua guys who blow off the development and support when
it's no longer amusing.  Critical mass of community and "who's gonna
do the gruntwork" are important long term issues.

> Premake is interesting, but not as extensible or powerful as one would
> expect. It does not support advanced build steps and does not have
> "extensions". For instance, it's unable to build applications that use Qt (a
> must-have, in my case).

CMake does something with Qt.  Not sure what, I just know that there's
an e-mail in my box every day about Qt something or other.  I never
read it because I don't care about Qt.  I think someone has made a Qt
front end for CMake, analogous to the MFC based CMakeSetup.

> I have previously used QMake, Ant, and am currently using SCons, but I've
> found it overly complex and way too slow for medium-sized projects.

CMake is fast.

> A mix of
> Premake, CMake and SCons based on Lua would come in handy.

Or you could just contribute to CMake.  I understand the NIH impulse
but I don't subscribe to it.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every