Re: Build systems suck. Can Lua be the basis for a better build system?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 12:53 PM, Sean Conner <sean@conman.org> wrote:
>   Sounds about par with my Kitchen Sink Lua (48k lines of C, 107 files), but
> make take 0.022s to figure out nothing has changed

Sure, it's hard to beat make, which I do admire - classic Unix design,
do one thing well, and depend on all the other Unix bits to do their
one thing well.  I don't particularly like the cruft that GNU has
added, however.  So finding a nicer Lua notation that translates
directly to a makefile is an attractive idea - especially for internal
projects.

If I can't cut down that 500ms to something around 100ms, then Lake
will fall into the SCons trap - pretty, convenient, and Does Not
Scale.[1]

BTW, developer boredom is a real source of mischief in the open source
world.  Most of my Lua projects are fairly mature and advance
conservatively, so I get this restless energy that needs to do
something new.  Perhaps a [RFP] tag - 'Request for Project' would be a
useful lua-l convention ;)

steve d. (leaving the building)

[1] Very good overview of the build problem:
http://blog.melski.net/2011/05/23/why-is-scons-so-slow/