[Scons-dev] SCons performance investigations

[Russel Winder]

On Tue, 2017-07-25 at 20:07 +0000, Jason Kenny wrote:
> > > 
[…]
> Scons, make, ninja, msbuild are items to compare. The idea of comparing
> CMake, Meson or autotools to SCons in incorrect. There is a big difference
> in a "generator" and a build system and a build manager (ie stuff like
> buildbot). I keep hearing how CMake is taking off and everyone is moving to
> it.... which is really saying it is better cross platform build file
> generator than automake.

SCons slightly bridges the gap between Make, Ninja, Tup on the one hand and
CMake and Meson on the other – I have no experience of all the Windows stuff.

Certainly CMake, and Meson, are getting increased traction in the native build
space, though Autotools and Make have a huge "install base". There is also
Bazel, Gradle, a whole host of build systems. I notice an increasing number of
people complaining about the CMake specification language. Meson implements a
DSL on Python rather than using Python which is sometimes annoying – but you
can hack and execute code if need be. 

SCons is caught in the middle a bit having started purely as a Make
replacement and not keeping up with Ninja and Tup in build performance and not
keeping up with Autotools, Meson, Reggae, and CMake of being meta build
systems. We should also not ignore all the language specific package handling
and build systems such as Cargo, Dub, and Gradle.

I guess the core question is "Where is SCons going?"

Currently for me SCons is the tool for the cases where there isn't another. So
for the moment I use SCons always for XeLaTeX builds and sometimes for D
builds, otherwise I am no longer using SCons because there is now a better or
more appropriate tool for each code base.

One of the biggest hurdles is CLion requiring CMake for C++ projects.

Another issue is of course the inertia behind people sticking with Make and
Autotools.

[…]

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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