Re: Make+Lua = winner (Re: Prime Mover v0.1)

[Ralph Hempel <rhempel@...>]

Ken Smith wrote:
> I recently posted a patch to the GNU make mailing list that hasn't
> gotten a lot of attention yet.
>
>  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-make/2006-10/msg00018.html
>
> It adds $(lua ...) to make so you can execute lua programs similarly
> to the way you can execute shell commands with $(shell ...).  I think
> this may obviate the need for Guile support which has been on the
> radar for several years.
>
> If any of you think this is a great thing for make, please make some
> noise at help-make@gnu.org so we can possibly get the maintainers to
> accept it into the official distribution for the next release.

Hmmm. I've used make for years for non-trivial cross platform
embedded systems builds. The same code is compiled and linked
for different processors, target boards, and memory maps. It
even supports multiple compiler toolchains...

Yes, it's a bit complicated, but one invocation of make builds
everything.

In some respects, learning to program make is a bit of an
intellectual leap - sort of like moving from procedural to
functional languages. Please note I'm not saying that if you
don't understand make that you're stupid.

I really like the fact that make looks after the "out of date"
part of the build logic, but using make to figure out things
like path names, extensions, library labels etc is too
complicated.

In many cases, you go out to the shell just to do something
that would be just as easy to do with a built-in scripting
language - like lua.

I'll think about this a bit as I'm currently doing some work
on my build system....

Cheers, Ralph