Re: Idea: a meta language for (language) build systems - npm, Racket, Rust cargo

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> skribis:

> If you strip out dependency management and cross-platform compiling
> there is not much left to do for cmake, autotools, cargo etc.
> Everything Guix is good at. Ninja resolves the build graph, you only
> need something to generate the build graph for source files. A
> mini-Guix of sorts for source files. Eelco, at the time, wrote Maak -
> a builder that would work on NixOS. He wrote it in Haskell, but it is
> similar thinking.
>
>   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maak

It is an inspiration for hacks like
<https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2021/reproducible-data-processing-pipelines/>.
This is the kind of thing you’d typically do using Make, but where using
Guix is advantageous.

Now, as for Maak, it needs a library of helpers to be readily
usable—“rules” to build .o from .c, libraries, etc.

Is that the kind of thing you have in mind?

Then again, once you have that, you’re still very far from replacing or
integrating with tools like Cargo.

I guess it’s all about finding the right spot where things can be
usefully glued together!

Ludo’.