BUSY VS rabs

CMake - as autotools - is a meta build system; it e.g. generates make files, which are essentially scripts. Also CMake itself is essentially a VM with a scripting language. Both CMake and Make are Turing complete (and dynamically typed, as mentioned). And yes, not all build systems are the same; e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/BUSY has a statically typed specification language and intentionally avoids a Turing complete language.

> Have you coded the lexer/parser from scratch

Yes. Here is the lexer: https://github.com/rochus-keller/BUSY/blob/main/bslex.c

and here is the parser: https://github.com/rochus-keller/BUSY/blob/main/bsparser.c

and here is the specification: http://software.rochus-keller.ch/busy_spec.html

I also developed and checked the EBNF in parallel using my EbnfStudio tool; this tool could also generate a parser, but since I'm using much of the Lua VM infrastructure a manual parser implementation was more straight-forward .

If you haven't seen it: https://github.com/rochus-keller/BUSY

> BUSY is a lean, statically typed, cross-platform, easily bootstrappable build system for GCC, CLANG and MSVC inspired by Google GN

It uses lua and config files that are mostly directories and filenames.

> Instead of qmake the BUSY build system (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/BUSY) is used

It must be a rite of passage to make(!) one's own build system, damn

I've also written my own alternative to make called Rabs (https://github.com/wrapl/rabs) which uses an imperative language to specify the dependency graph as well as the build instructions. It's designed for really fast incremental builds.

Indeed, the API started off much lighter when I first worked on it (for a generic build system https://github.com/wrapl/rabs) but over time I made it more and more flexible as I found different applications for it.