[CMake] improve the CMake language?
Juan E. Sanchez
Juan.Sanchez at amd.com
Fri Nov 2 11:49:54 EDT 2007
On Fri, 2 Nov 2007, Brandon Van Every wrote:
> On Nov 1, 2007 11:40 PM, Sanchez, Juan <juan.sanchez at amd.com> wrote:
>>
>> Tcl is a simple language, and is well understood. It has already been
>> ported to about every platform out there. You don't need QT or wxWidgets,
>> because the Tk extensions of it already work.
>
> Tcl's popularity is also on the wane. I don't think hitching CMake's
> post to Tcl is a good marketing idea. I'd pick Ruby, for the regex
> support. Hey it's better 'n' Perl 6. :-)
>
>> Many features in the CMake language don't really work the way people
>> expect, or are not documented, or both.
>
> I agree that much can be improved about the documentation. I'd like
> to note, however, that some improvements are happening in CVS right
> now. Enough to make me think that Kitware does take documentation
> seriously and that strategically, documentation problems are going to
> be addressed. I've given a lot of gloom and doom about documentation,
> that if the status quo is maintained, in 3 years' time CMake will
> start to lose customers as other build systems catch up in technical
> capability. But I do think 3 years is the level of urgency of the
> problem. We'd all like things right this second, but open source has
> its resource limitations. Recently I suggested organizing Google
> Summer Of Code projects to address such things.
>
>> If anyone would like to fork cmake with me, I'm game.
>>
>> Features:
>>
>> Tcl frontend featuring modern dynamic language constructs and consistent
>> syntax.
>>
>> C pre-processor based dependency scanner
>>
>> Accurate and up to date documentation
>>
>> Focus on getting build system that works, because all of the language
>> constructs have already been written.
>>
>> Developers who are not hostile to ideas concerning improvements to the
>> language.
>
> To make real improvements in all of those areas, you'd need a lot of
> funding. What kind of mandate do you have? There's not much point in
> saying "everything's gonna be better" if you don't have the labor.
>
> Second question, if you do have serious development resources at your
> disposal: what improvements in CMake would cause you to stick around
> rather than going your own way? Is a position of compromise possible?
This would be a community effort. I don't have the resources to
strike out on my own. I like using cmake. The language is kind of a
bitter pill for people in my organization to swallow.
The most important item on my proposed feature list is the Tcl
frontend.
Juan
>
>
> Cheers,
> Brandon Van Every
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>
>
Juan Sanchez
Juan.Sanchez at amd.com
800-538-8450 Ext. 54395
512-602-4395
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