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by jcelerier 1809 days ago
Crazy, I'd definitely use CMake above autotools (does not even work natively on windows LOL), handwritten makefiles (not supporting filenames with spaces in 2021 LOL), "the IDE" (do you even do cross-platform?).

I'd use Bazel but afaik it mostly uses a rebuild-the-world approach.. I'm already getting flak from Linux distros maintainers because I use some vendored header-only libraries and not system ones so I don't see how that is even supposed to work.
1 comments
zelly 1808 days ago
Bazel does the opposite of rebuild-the-world. That's more of a CMake thing (rm -rf build && mkdir build && cd build && cmake ..). Bazel won't even run tests if the code the tests depend on have not changed. A lot of thought went into Bazel. It caches everything it possibly can.

> I'm already getting flak from Linux distros maintainers because I use some vendored header-only libraries and not system ones so I don't see how that is even supposed to work.

That's where you use autotools. It has been around long enough that every package manager knows how to deal with it. For most C/C++ programs, autotools is all you need. You should learn it because it's not going away.

"the IDE" (like VS project files) is definitely not cross-platform (although it can be), but not everything needs to be cross platform. For game devs building on DirectX, for example, it's completely pointless to support other platforms when the runtime depends on a single platform.

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jcelerier 1807 days ago
> Bazel does the opposite of rebuild-the-world.

by "rebuild the world" I don't mean "do a clean rebuild" (which frankly isn't a problem in 2021 with CMake + Ninja, the last time I had to rebuild is when the compiler changed from clang-11 to clang-12) but "to build a bazel-based software, all its dependencies must be built with bazel too", e.g. it's harder if you want to link against system-provided Qt, ffmpeg, ...

> That's where you use autotools. It has been around long enough that every package manager knows how to deal with it.

and yet it still sucks on windows if you want to use cl.exe (or if you want Xcode / VS solutions, which is regularly my case).

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