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by mikepurvis 3286 days ago
Huh. Okay, that was not immediately apparent from viewing the project— it looked like a hand-written Makefile. Link for the curious:

https://github.com/bkaradzic/GENie

Appreciating that CMake has its warts, it also has a ton of mindshare and has lots of convenient modules for handling common dependencies. What are the motivations to use a Lua-based scheme instead?
1 comments
dbartolini 3286 days ago
I find GENie/premake way simpler to read and write. Also, you have more flexibility since your build scripts have full-fledged Lua capabilities.
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mikepurvis 3286 days ago
Yeah, similar sentiments in the PPT presentation here: https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?cid=171ee76e679935c8&pag...

CMake is "too complicated" and "you need to be an expert". Understandable, I suppose. There are certainly specific things in CMake which are pretty terrible, like the add_custom_command/add_custom_target dance, but from the perspective of someone who has had to become an expert in it (via ROS/catkin), I would be unlikely to give it up. There's just way too much stuff it gives you for free, especially when it comes to things like packaging, testing, etc.

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mikepurvis 3286 days ago
Okay, the other thing I would say having examined this a bit is that GENie seems to be much more "project" oriented than CMake. CMake has a concept of projects, but its usual model centers around targets and directories as the main unit to reason about. That is, CMake's most native output format is a Makefile, with adapters to generate IDE projects.

GENie seems to be focused first and foremost on a project/solution-oriented IDE workflow, with the Makefile generator as the one that's tacked on. So I can definitely appreciate that if you're working on a project where everyone's in an IDE anyway, it would make sense to use a generator that has the IDE's concepts as a first class citizen.

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