Re: Premake vs. CMake

["Wesley Smith" <wesley.hoke@...>]

 > Nobody has yet made a successful case that for a large project,
> "fullblown" scripting languages can do things that CMake script can't.
>  Perhaps that case could be made, and I keep looking around for an
> exemplar of it, but it hasn't been made.  I think Kitware would be
> receptive to the argument *if* it could be made, but nobody's been
> able to make it.  People keep talking about things that Kitware is
> capable of addressing by improving CMake in pretty much the form it's
> currently in.


This conversation has been a bit repetitive so I post this with
apologies to those not interested in the discussion, but here's my
response to this "fullblown" question.  What I'm interested in doing
right now is constructing a application for multimedia composition
that serves three main purposes:

1) Supports multimedia research
2) Supports multimedia composition
3) Supports distribution of multimedia compositions as self-contained
applications

These are 3 quite different modalities that the application has to
work in.  One dictates a certain malleability of the application
itself.  Another suggests a well designed interface and range of
libraries for working with multimedia.  The latter requires a well
designed, flexible, and easy to use deployment/build system.  For this
project, I'm not assuming users to necessarily be hard core
programmers who are willing to invest time in learning something like
CMake sript syntax to support item 3 (this also comes into play in
implementing item 1).  I do assume people can program and are willing
to use Lua.  What I need for this project is a serious build system
that is flexible enough that I can design a high-level API around it
for end users to, with a few lines of code, write a deployment/build
script for their compositions and research applications.  I hope you
can see the utility of having a language like Lua available within a
build tool in this case.  For me the build tool is not a separate
thing.  It is actually a good chunk of the application and the
application shouldn't have to have multiple scripting languages.
That's kind of absurd.  Granted, this is a very special case that
doesn't apply to 99% of applications out there.

Anyway, I've downloaded the Lua CMake branch.  I haven't looked
thoroughly through the source yet, but from the wiki article, it seems
like it could serve as a nice starting point for implementing this
section of the application, especially if someone else is constantly
improving the build engine :)

That said, right now I'm using VTK which is a big (as in powerful yet
somewhat bloated) library that uses CMake.  I was actually shocked at
how easy it was to build given the dependencies and massiveness of the
whole thing, so kudos to CMake on that one.

best,
wes