[kxyvr]

Since you made a mention of CMake, does Rust really provide an alternative for building multilanguage projects? When I went to look for examples on how this is managed, it seemed horrendous. For example, some projects manage this by writing a program to download, unzip, and build the source:

https://github.com/elrnv/ipopt-rs/blob/master/ipopt-sys/buil...

Others just assume that the libraries are there, but they still require a program to compile them:

https://github.com/cmr/openblas-src/blob/master/build.rs

As long as all of the dependencies are in Rust, things appear nice. At the same time, unless I'm missing something, it seems like crates manages multilanguage projects poorly. Though I have some major gripes with CMake, I've managed multilanguage projects mostly well.

Is there a sane way outside of CMake to manage a multilanguage project with Rust?

[blakesmith]

Check out Bazel: http://bazel.build. I've been using it a lot to build several multi lingual projects that include Java, C++, embedded C, Javascript, CSS, and even Docker images. There are community Rust rules, that I haven't tried yet, but am planning on investigating soon: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_rust

[digitaLandscape]

Is there a non-Google alternative for those of us who don’t want our builds spied on?

[OtterCoder]

Not so much with Rust in the driver's seat. Cargo, Rust's primary toolchain, only has weak support for pre/post build scripts. It's solely concerned with Rust's own dependencies and compilation. In the couple of projects where I've added Rust to a larger project, it's always been bash or node that coordinates the overall build.

[oever]

You can call a compiler for C/C++ from build.rs. That tooling is currently not very advanced. As far as I know there is no crate to write compile recipes that as easily as a Makefile or CMakeLists.txt.

When I tried this in build.rs, I had to check modification times myself.

There is an opening for a ninja-type crate in Rust.