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by gaurav1804 1453 days ago
Hi! Basically it is supposed to do what Make does... but in a faster and more user-friendly way. Note that Make doesn't have the best syntax. But Beast has sort of a 'python' syntax. It supports strings and integers. Variable modification assignment. It even supports scoping (within and outside beast build rules).

Plus, it is an order of a magnitude faster than Make. All in all, I don't agree with the fact that it's syntax is similar to Make. Well for one thing it has legible special variable names like 'out' and 'dep'.

So yes, while it is a low level build system, it is an improvement over Make in terms of syntax and speed.
1 comments
dale_glass 1453 days ago
How is it faster? And faster at what?
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gaurav1804 1453 days ago
By 'faster' I mean better build times than Make for a project of particular size. Benchmarking is going on right now, and the difference in performance is clearly visible.
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dale_glass 1453 days ago
Okay, but what specifically is faster?

Make is rarely a big bottleneck, except in very pathologically written projects, and when doing incremental builds. I think the main problem with big make setups is recursive make, which prevents it from having a global view on the project, and forces the main make to execute many sub-makes recursively, all of which has overhead.

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gaurav1804 1450 days ago
The build process is faster. There are a number of algorithms running (on several threads) while building. That is where optimisation kicks in.
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aidenn0 1452 days ago
I suspect they are benchmarking recursive make vs recursive beast; the very first example in the readme suggests recursion
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dale_glass 1452 days ago
Good point. I have to say I'm wary of that, recursive make is not a good idea, and the problem can't be fixed by building a better make, because the issue is that it breaks up the dependency graph and creates build problems.

Eg, if you have src/lib, and src/bin, and the src/bin project depends on the src/lib library, then in self-contained, recursively invoked makefiles (or anything else), you won't get a correct behavior when a header in the library changes.

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aidenn0 1452 days ago
Other make replacements have solved this by making the dependency graph independent of the file structure. Hopefully beast does this too
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