[CMake] CMake IR

[Nicolas Desprès]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 2:51 PM, Nagy-Egri Máté Ferenc <csiga.biga at aol.com>
wrote:

>  Hi Nico,
>
> thank you for the idea. That idea occured to me too, trying to generate
> the CMakelists.txt script from the desired front-end. Having taken a deep
> dive into XML schemas, hardcore people even criticise W3C XML Schemas for
> not having a mathematical foundation which make it difficult to reason
> about backward compatibility of change to the schema. Using the CMake
> script, a stateful, imperative script language as an intermediate
> introduces even more threats, than using a not so well defined, but at
> least stateless datastructure like XML.
>

I disagree with that statement because I do not see any issue in generating
stateful language. autoconf generates shell script. bison, flex, and many
others generates C code. Compilers front-end generate IR which is nothing
else than a unified assembly language. Compilers back-end generate assembly
language for various CPU. Correct me if I am wrong but all those languages
are stateful and all thoses generators have been working pretty well for
decades. I think the true requirement is whether the language being
generated is stable or not. The CMake script language is stable and a lot
of effort is spent to keep backward compatibility via policies.

[...]


-- 
Nicolas Desprès
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