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Please – A cross-language build system

please.build

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Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#71

Post by eptcyka »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #35

"Please supports Linux, macOS and FreeBSD at the moment" Let me know when I can actually use this on any machine I have to work on, instead of going "fuck you, Windows users". Writing cross-platform build tooling isn't rocket science, it's a choice. And the choice made here is stupidly disappointing in near as makes no difference 2021.

It's open source, if you want it, you can add support for it. Which is a lot more than what you can do for a lot of other development tools that only run on Windows and have lackluster or no support on Linux.

Also, they might just not have Windows developers or a use case for running the tool on Windows, so even if the cost of adding Windows support was zero, they'd have to go out of their way to test it. A lot of open source code might run just fine on Cygwin, but most people choose not to support Cygwin because damn near no-one uses it anyway.

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#72

Post by EdSchouten »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #35

"Please supports Linux, macOS and FreeBSD at the moment" Let me know when I can actually use this on any machine I have to work on, instead of going "fuck you, Windows users". Writing cross-platform build tooling isn't rocket science, it's a choice. And the choice made here is stupidly disappointing in near as makes no difference 2021.

It’s not just a choice. It’s also the kind of tooling the people developing the system have at their disposal.

For example, if all I have is a MacBook running macOS and Docker, how can I reasonably expect to port this to Windows? I haven’t owned a Windows machine for 10 years.

I am the author of Buildbarn, a build cluster implementation for Bazel/Pants/.... Buildbarn also doesn’t support Windows. If someone sent me high quality patches for Windows, I’d merge them for sure, but nobody has. Sorry you are ‘stupidly disappointed’ in me.

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#73

Post by tus88 »

rthomas6 wrote: post #67

I come from a sofware world not typical for HN. I am a (very) low level software and FPGA guy. Despite my best efforts, I don't understand: What do any of these tools do that Make does not? Are they faster and easier to use? Do they work better?

Make is not written in Golang/Rust/Haskell and lacks a cool logo and hip landing page.

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#74

Post by ironmagma »

rthomas6 wrote: post #67

I come from a sofware world not typical for HN. I am a (very) low level software and FPGA guy. Despite my best efforts, I don't understand: What do any of these tools do that Make does not? Are they faster and easier to use? Do they work better?

The problem with Make is that it’s never just Make. It’s also Autoconf, Automake, m4, and god-knows-what-else. If Make is so great, why are people resorting to generating the Makefiles? There’s clearly some kind of deep UX problem there.

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#75

Post by jes5199 »

rthomas6 wrote: post #67

I come from a sofware world not typical for HN. I am a (very) low level software and FPGA guy. Despite my best efforts, I don't understand: What do any of these tools do that Make does not? Are they faster and easier to use? Do they work better?

I think it’s 1. people find makefiles confusing, and if someone’s introduction to the concept is a large project they may never pick up the basics and 2. Make’s fundamental assumptions: that each command creates a single, sensible artifact that is the input for the next phase, maps poorly to the dynamic build processes of browser and phone ecosystems, which are themselves barely controlled explosions of complexity

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#76

Post by johnnujler »

rthomas6 wrote: post #67

I come from a sofware world not typical for HN. I am a (very) low level software and FPGA guy. Despite my best efforts, I don't understand: What do any of these tools do that Make does not? Are they faster and easier to use? Do they work better?

I don’t about these new build tools, but I’ve usually found ninja to be faster than make in most situations at least.

Also curious to know, is there no work done in the realm of developer productivity inside the FPGA world?

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#77

Post by megous »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #47
geofft wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you inspected one of these scripts? What have you found? (I've tried it a few times and haven't felt like I learned anything meaningful from doing so.)

I almost always inspect these kinds of scripts before running, more out of curiosity than anything, but also so that I know its not going to do that so stupid that even I can see it's stupid. Usually you can just pipe to `cat`, which is super low effort to do. I've occasionally seen scripts that install some other application where it was not clear that it was a dependency and there was no heads up to the user that t…

cat to terminal is kinda not enough. I can own you very easily if you do just that and think you've seen all the code that will be executed.

Save to file, and read the file in the editor.

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#78

Post by ironmagma »

RangerScience wrote: post #62
tatskaari wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I maintain please and will be the first one to admit we’re not the best at marketing it. We’ve mostly been focused on getting it up to scratch and only recently have we been trying to publicise it. With that being said I have put a good amount of work into the QuickStart. The code labs are designed to get you up and started in an inviting way. If you have any specific feedback about your QuickStart experience I’…

Thank you for making this! My rubric for documentation is "how many clicks to code". I found the installation instructions, and started to look for usage, but didn't find it. Too many clicks. That's where I'd start. PS - IMO the gold standard for this evaluation method is Sinatra.rb, which is zero clicks to code.

Are you referring to this [1]? I had to click Documentation to get here and still didn’t see any code...

[1] http://sinatrarb.com/documentation.html

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#79

Post by weaksauce »

tatskaari wrote: post #42
mdoms wrote: post #11

It's hard to tell what the value proposition is here, apart from vague hand-waving about parallelization. The quick start is not enough to get started actually building something. Changing build systems is hard, and getting buy-in from the team even harder - so you need to demonstrate value up front.

Hey, I maintain please and will be the first one to admit we’re not the best at marketing it. We’ve mostly been focused on getting it up to scratch and only recently have we been trying to publicise it. With that being said I have put a good amount of work into the QuickStart. The code labs are designed to get you up and started in an inviting way. If you have any specific feedback about your QuickStart experience I’…

A few sample build configs of varying complexity would be nice to see at a glance to understand what you are getting into without digging through the weeds.
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