[tonyedgecombe]

>Kinda impressive and terrifying that Chromium needs its own build system.

This is one area where I think it makes some sense to build your own. Most projects only use a fraction of the capability of a typical build system. The last time I did this I managed the whole thing in just 300 lines of code.

[bluGill]

I stronly disagree. While you use a fraction of the features you often mistake it works for it is right and to something subtle is wrong. You end up either not working or dedicating a lot of effort fixing weird corner cases that you didn't think of

[tonyedgecombe]

>You end up either not working or dedicating a lot of effort fixing weird corner cases that you didn't think of

That's not my experience at all. Part of my job is to think about weird corner cases, I'm not sure why a build script should be any worse than what I normally deal with.

[bluGill]

Now that I'm on a real computer (keyboard) maybe I can elaborate a bit.

It isn't hard to create a basic build system. However there are a lot more rare corner cases than anyone who sets out to create one as a side project realizes and so in almost all cases their build systems work for the easy/common situations, but in lots of weird cases it doesn't work. Often those corner cases will happen on setups that make sense for one exactly person in the world but for everyone else is stupid. (think cross compiling on haiku-os for a vax running netbsd)

Which is to say if you want to create a build system that needs to be your only goal. You can maybe make the goal create the build system that some project needs (Chromium in this case) needs, but you won't be doing any hacking on the project (Chromium) itself because all your time will be spent on the build system.

Since everyone I know thinks of build systems as a side project they should just choose one that works. I use cmake, which works well despite the warts. I've heard good things about build2 and bazel, but I have no experience with either. I have used ninja as well (that is handwritten ninja files), but it isn't intended for that purpose and so in general I wouldn't recommend it.

[bluGill]

It isn't worse than other corner cases - but for almost everyone it isn't what their boss wants them to spend all their time on. Even if working for your own fun you probably want to do something else.