Ask HN: What kind of Software "Jigs" do you have?

[elisk]

In woodworking and other crafts there are Jigs that are used and built for the purpose of creating something else - it's a tool or a device specifically made to and while making something else.

Do you have such Jigs in software? if so what kind of jigs do you use? How do you use them?

[mikewarot]

Long ago the libraries I wrote in Turbo Pascal were a sort of jig. The way I wrote comments was another.

  12/31/2023 - MAW - Added example

I think of a lot of conventions and practices that I always did, no matter what as something like a foundation.

The pkZip archives on floppy disk, got replaced with Git eventually. It's a new, better jig. Or maybe better yet is the .ignore file I always copy into a new repo.

[ksherlock]

There are a lot of code generators, like lex/flex, bison/yacc, re2c, ragel, lemon, antlr, gperf, xxd. Maybe they don't count because they're pre-existing tools, but you can see how they might have started as a one-off tool and grew from there. I've written plenty of my own, either to generate code or generate tables of data at compile time.

[vvendigo]

Script generating DBO class skeleton from DB table (I've made and used 20 years ago).

[48864w6ui]

Any library?

Edit: staged computation?

[kingkongjaffa]

Do Makefiles count?

I set up various incantations like:

make build

make run

make test

make lint