[maccard]

That blog post is an impressive logical leap on the authors part.

I realise that the post is not from recently but the benchmarks are on seriously outdated software and hardwaee, those specs are over a decade old at this stage. His conclusions are also misleading, all of his graphs show that make is 2-10x faster than scons, and that make scales better than scons.he seems hell bent on proving there's no quadratic complexity, despite there being an order of magnitude of a difference!

On the other hand, I don't think it's reasonable to assume every build system will immediately support every compiler/IDE. At the end of the day, scons is an open source project and if that's the only issue stopping you using it, I'm sure they'd be happy to accept patches providing support rather than wait months.

[beagle3]

Scons is almost 20 years old at this point. There are projects like waf that tried to fix it but ended up incompatible (and faster and more usable).

Scons has great ideas, but something either about the implementation or about reality fails to deliver.

[maccard]

As is cmake. Make is about to hit a mid life crisis, other projects like Ninja are faster and more lightweight, projects like WAF/Premake use a scripting language instead of a DSL, others liek FASTbuild claim to support distrobuted builds. At a certain point, sofradre has to be accepted for what it is, not what it claims to be.

[jlarocco]

I agree it's a peculiar system to use for benchmarking in 2018, but for comparison purposes it shouldn't matter much as long as the same software/hardware are used for both Make and SCons.

There's definitely some mental gymnastics and careful massaging going on to hide the performance problem. Would be a great example for a "How to lie with charts and graphs" article.

[maccard]

I think it is still invalid to consider for a benchmark. We don't consider a car track based on how quickly 10 year old cars can navigate it.

In the last decade we have gone from everyone needs an antivirus to Windows 10 is good enough for most people. We've had Spectre and meltdown, SSDs have become viable and been replaced by nvmE SSDs we've had a decade of OS development, filesystem development and hardware improvements.weve also had huge improvements in build ststems, Ninja was only relewaeed in 2012!

And yet, even after all of that, the TLDR from the article is "scons is an order of magnitude slower than make, but my hardware was the bottleneck before i figured it out scaled quadratically, therefore scons is not slow".

[geezerjay]

> On the other hand, I don't think it's reasonable to assume every build system will immediately support every compiler/IDE.

If your API is stable, why wouldn't it be reasonable to expect that it should work out of the box?

[maccard]

I don't think visual studio had ever claimed to have a stable API. 2019/2017/2015 have been good, but there was some definitely teething issues migrating to their current situation. That doesn't necessitate months of waiting - there is nothing stopping me or you adding support for an unstable API