Re: [ANN] Lake - another Lua-based Build Tool

[Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@...>]

On 11/10/2010 19:59, steve donovan wrote:
> Lake used to be called Bou [0],

I suggest to update the wiki page to point to Lake.
Googling for "lua build tool", the page on Bou was the first listed, and seeing your 
signature at the end, I remembered this thread...

> but I discovered that the logical name
> 'lake' was not particularly overloaded. Like PrimeMover it's a build
> rule interpreter, not makefile generator. It was designed from the
> ground up to be cross-platform and so the actual compiler details are
> abstracted as possible.

Still, from a quick look, it seems to be natively aimed at C[++] compilation, no? Oh, 
well, so is make, and it can be used for quite different compilation tasks (my company 
used to compile a quite large Java code base, before switching to Ant).

> It is a single Lua file, only dependent on LuaFileSystem.

I haven't found a compiled binary for Windows of the altter, I suppose I must compile it 
myself. LfW isn't an option, I want a lightweight package... :-)

Honestly, even if the dog hasn't eat my homework, I just started to read the manual, so I 
don't know yet if it is suited at what I want to do.
I will lazily expose my goal here, as discussing it might improve interest in Lake... ;-)

I recently started to learn Scala, an interesting language in the (very strongly) 
statically typed category.
So far, I only compiled single files with little or no dependency, so the command line was 
good enough.
Now, I start to try small sample files with a rather complex classpath, so I searched 
something more sophisticated.

Shell files (well, .cmd in my case) are quite limited.
Ant, I prefer to avoid. Tried it and got an XML allergy... (at least when one try to 
program with an XML dialect!). Same for Maven.
SBT (simple build tool) is praised in the Scala community, but I found out it has a 
tendency to download Scala 2.7.7 for each small project (!) while I want to use 2.8.0 
already on my computer. No visible way out of this behavior, so exit.
I saw good words on Buildr, but I don't want a simple tool to depend on a multi-megabyte 
language (OK, I made an exception for Bazaar...).

Hence my search for a tool depending on a lightweight language, Lua being an obvious 
choice for that... :-)

Thus, I hope there is a support for compilers of the JVM (and others).
I don't know if it is possible at all, but maybe you could make a little module per 
supported compiler. Eg. one for Microsoft's CL, one for GCC, and so on. Could make support 
of other compilers easier by providing separate examples and avoiding to hack the main 
module. Or maybe this isn't necessary at all?

OK, now to finish reading the manual (and compile LFS).

--
Philippe Lhoste
--  (near) Paris -- France
--  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
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