For a long time, I wanted to make a makefile replacement. Writing a good makefile is surprisingly non-trivial if you want certain features. For example, the internal pattern rules of make fail if you want to do an out of tree build, which is most modern builds. Moreover, making sure that make does not fail when a dependent header file is surprisingly obscure. Even to this day, the best makefile template is very much a matter of debate.
Because of this, I decided to make my own makefile replacement. It was intended to be mostly for personal use, since I would often write small test programs in C++. I outlined three major features I wanted out of it: syntactic similarity to make, multithreading, and portability.
Syntax
Syntactic similarity to make was important to this project since it needed to parse dependency files generated by GCC. I also wanted to create custom pattern rules. I felt that make’s conflation of pattern rules and normal rules discouraged people from using normal rules, instead manually writing out every task and dependency by hand.
Multithreading
Obviously, in order to have some amount of parity to make, suru needed the ability to run tasks in parallel. Multithreading would later add additional complexity, but ultimately wasn’t too difficult of a challenge.
Portability
For various reasons, I utilize windows just as much as I utilize linux. This means that this needs be able to execute programs and read file names from all operating systems.
Rust
It might seem a little odd to write a C/C++ build tool in Rust, never mind
upload it onto crates.io, but there are real reasons for doing so. crates.io
is a widely available service that has been used to
build tools before, so what I’m doing is
hardly unprecedented.
Moreover, the Rust standard library has the ability to execute commands and
accept their input, which is far above the C standard library’s relatively
barren system() function.
Because of this, I’ve decided to build suru in Rust. Partially because of the practical reasons above, partially because it would be an interesting exercise, and partially because it would be funny.