| > it's a pain to build Yes. So in Sciter I've replaced its build system with relatively simple premake5 script. That replacement took couple of days but was worth it. Premake5 generates human-readable IDE solutions and make files. So you need just a compiler to build the whole thing. > building it from source takes 20-30 minutes on a modern laptop. It is not that bad actually. Just tried full rebuild of x64/Windows version: Whole sciter.dll (HTML/CSS/JS/Graphics) with Skia backend: sciter.dll build completed at 9:11 AM and took 07:03.415 minutes
Same sciter.dll but with Direct2D backend: sciter.dll build completed at 9:22 AM and took 02:34.412 minutes
So Skia takes ~4 minutes to build on pretty average development desktop machine.> it's constantly changing its APIs That's very true and is a pain indeed if to change its version frequently. Yet there is no such concept as "Skia version" - just revisions/milestones. It used to be an attempt to make stable plain C API but AFAIR it was removed recently. Same thing about Google ANGLE that I started to use recently in Sciter.GLX: https://sciter.com/sciter-glx-beta2/ |
premake5 is a monolithic/portable executable that contains Lua + specific runtime.
Thus it does not rely on installed Python as in GN case as other tools.
Having standard and well known and documented Lua on board benefits the maker a lot. In my opinion any modern build system must include generic and known PL.
And that above is the problem of modern CMake. It started as simple static declarative thing but life forced it to evolve into dynamic programming language with very strange notation and runtime model.