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Usually it is because as soon as the build gets a little complex, you need to define your own logic. In a minute, you are scripting your build tool with a Turi

Usually it is because as soon as the build gets a little complex, you need to define your own logic. In a minute, you are scripting your build tool with a Turing complete language. And of course users of language X want to script their build using X. That just makes sense - define a build DSL inside your own language. For some reasons, though, the de facto build DSL used by Scala suffers by all the issues mentioned by Li Haoyi in his blog post

wink 9y ago
Of course it will be hard, but most build tools often do the same thing - no matter the language or ecosystem. I haven't seen any real effort to try to standardize on APIs, so you could write your "plugins" in your language of choice and the "glue" code would be this language-independent build tool. I'd say I've mostly given up on this. I have a Makefile for every project, which in turn of course uses the language-specific build tool, but for example when I wanted to use webpack (migrating from a mess of gulp+bower+npm from angular.js to just webpack for angular) I wrote a simple PoC Makefile with hacky sed-/awk-/lines and a lot of cp and cat in just a few hours (massive build script). Then the result was working as intended and I could refactor all the stuff where there's a nice webpack plugin and get rid of my Makefile hacks. Now in the end the Makefile just provides a common starting point that has "executable docs" for every language specific tool. "make bootstrap/test/run/build", no matter what language the project is in - for the low cost of having to update the Makefile when you change something major or some arguments. Not advocating this for all orgs (please use what makes YOUR team happy) but I've heard nothing but positive things about this from my team.
- Someone 9y ago
  https://github.com/apple/swift-llbuild https://github.com/apple/swift-llbuild may be too low-level for what you envision, but captures a lot of your ideas, I think. https://llvm.org/devmtg/2016-11/#abstracts https://llvm.org/devmtg/2016-11/#abstracts has a presentation. It focuses on compiling with clang, but the system is more flexible. Slides at https://llvm.org/devmtg/2016-11/Slides/Dunbar-NewArchitectureForBuildingSoftware.pdf https://llvm.org/devmtg/2016-11/Slides/Dunbar-NewArchitectur..., matching video is at https://youtu.be/b_T-eCToX1I https://youtu.be/b_T-eCToX1I.
js8 9y ago
I am not sure if build scripts really need to be Turing complete. Wouldn't something like Dhall be appropriate?
- oblio 9y ago
  It would be glorious if anyone could understand it. After reading their readme (https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang) for about 10 minutes, actually trying to understand it, I don't. That's a problem. A big one. Maybe you could explain for the feeble-minded such as myself: - how would you represent a simple key=value in dhall? - how yould you represent a dictionary in dhall (multiple key=value entries)? - how would you represent an array in dhall? - maybe a more complex structure, say, translate (by hand) a package.json file to dhall? (Nevermind, I found the tutorial. But the readme page is IMO a big fail if dhall wants wide adoption. If it doesn't then, ignore my criticism :) )
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  I am. I need turing complete code to build stuff very regularly. I'd rather we aimed to make build scripts that are turing complete and as short and simple as possible rather than non-turing complete.
  - Someone 9y ago
    Can you explain what you do that requires a Turing complete build language and couldn’t be done, for example, in the ‘make equivalent’ of the dtrace scripting language?
    - crdoconnor 9y ago
      * Checking some condition before building something in a particular way. * Retrying something if it fails. * A hundred other different scenarios which crop up occasionally, require about 4 lines of turing complete code, and are an absolute bitch to handle in a language deliberately designed not to make it possible.
deleted 9y ago
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wink 9y ago

Of course it will be hard, but most build tools often do the same thing - no matter the language or ecosystem. I haven't seen any real effort to try to standardize on APIs, so you could write your "plugins" in your language of choice and the "glue" code would be this language-independent build tool. I'd say I've mostly given up on this. I have a Makefile for every project, which in turn of course uses the language-specific build tool, but for example when I wanted to use webpack (migrating from a mess of gulp+bower+npm from angular.js to just webpack for angular) I wrote a simple PoC Makefile with hacky sed-/awk-/lines and a lot of cp and cat in just a few hours (massive build script). Then the result was working as intended and I could refactor all the stuff where there's a nice webpack plugin and get rid of my Makefile hacks. Now in the end the Makefile just provides a common starting point that has "executable docs" for every language specific tool. "make bootstrap/test/run/build", no matter what language the project is in - for the low cost of having to update the Makefile when you change something major or some arguments. Not advocating this for all orgs (please use what makes YOUR team happy) but I've heard nothing but positive things about this from my team.

Someone 9y ago
https://github.com/apple/swift-llbuild https://github.com/apple/swift-llbuild may be too low-level for what you envision, but captures a lot of your ideas, I think. https://llvm.org/devmtg/2016-11/#abstracts https://llvm.org/devmtg/2016-11/#abstracts has a presentation. It focuses on compiling with clang, but the system is more flexible. Slides at https://llvm.org/devmtg/2016-11/Slides/Dunbar-NewArchitectureForBuildingSoftware.pdf https://llvm.org/devmtg/2016-11/Slides/Dunbar-NewArchitectur..., matching video is at https://youtu.be/b_T-eCToX1I https://youtu.be/b_T-eCToX1I.

js8 9y ago

I am not sure if build scripts really need to be Turing complete. Wouldn't something like Dhall be appropriate?

oblio 9y ago
It would be glorious if anyone could understand it. After reading their readme (https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang) for about 10 minutes, actually trying to understand it, I don't. That's a problem. A big one. Maybe you could explain for the feeble-minded such as myself: - how would you represent a simple key=value in dhall? - how yould you represent a dictionary in dhall (multiple key=value entries)? - how would you represent an array in dhall? - maybe a more complex structure, say, translate (by hand) a package.json file to dhall? (Nevermind, I found the tutorial. But the readme page is IMO a big fail if dhall wants wide adoption. If it doesn't then, ignore my criticism :) )
crdoconnor 9y ago
I am. I need turing complete code to build stuff very regularly. I'd rather we aimed to make build scripts that are turing complete and as short and simple as possible rather than non-turing complete.
- Someone 9y ago
  Can you explain what you do that requires a Turing complete build language and couldn’t be done, for example, in the ‘make equivalent’ of the dtrace scripting language?
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    * Checking some condition before building something in a particular way. * Retrying something if it fails. * A hundred other different scenarios which crop up occasionally, require about 4 lines of turing complete code, and are an absolute bitch to handle in a language deliberately designed not to make it possible.

deleted 9y ago

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