Show HN: Xmake, a modern C/C++ build utility

What rubs me the wrong way is that a lot of build systems have a fatal combination of unfamiliar syntax and complete lack of debuggability.

Conan and Meson seem so much better in that regard.

> just create a virtual environment

Yaw super lightweight ...

Conan is orthogonal to the choice of build system, as in fact Conan's main choice of build system is cmake.

What I miss about these tools is some "relatively" straightforward dependency detection and generation.

That is, I have a bunch of .cpp files which need to be compiled into individual executables in a folder bin/. I also have a folder inc/ which contains some headers (.h) and those headers possibly also have some associated TU (.cpp).

Now g++ can already generate a dependency graph of headers for an executable. It is then (with a standard Makefile and some supporting bash scripts) quite straightforward to mangle that graph into a list of translation units (namely those files whose name matches a depended-on header) which must be compiled and linked into the executable.

That is, I can simply create a new "executable file" .cpp file in bin/, include some headers therein and when I say make, the Makefile automagically figures out which (internal) dependencies it needs to link in when linking the executable.

Now that I have these "relatively straightforward" scripts and the corresponding Makefile, the incentive to move to another (nicer) build system which would require me to rebuild this infrastructure to fit into this other build system's view of the world is quite low – unless there is some way to do this directly?

Xmake as shown here (and also Meson linked in a sister comment) appear to still require manual selection of dependencies.

Personally, I vastly prefer autotools, both as a user and developer. When I got to the point I needed some kind of build system, I found autotools much easier to learn than cmake.

As user, I find the experience with autotools to be much nicer as well. For whatever reason, the interface just seems more intuitive. I mean, ./configure --help will tell you basically all you need to know. An underappreciated bonus is that you don't have to install more stuff just to __build__ some program you might not even want. I've run into more than one project that required a specific version of cmake, which as luck would have it, was not the version packaged with my distro. This leaves you either building another cmake first or finding a tool/library that isn't so persnickety.

Given the choice between trying a project that uses CMake or or autools, I'll choose the autotools based project every time.