BUSY VS shellb

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

Great question, initially I was aware of only plain old makefiles, this was back in 2010, then I came to know about autoconf which was a huge pain, then picked up cmake which was slightly better and stable, then I read about xmake, then meson, then scons and integrated all of them by hand, finally a couple of years ago, I was overwhelmed with the incremental changes to the framework causing build files to change and I was not able to keep up, so wanted something super easy and simple and hence create a simple stupid build tool called shellb. Then was reading about sandboxed builds and started working on bazel I had made a resolution to not write any more build files for any new tools, so integrated the generator within shellb, just last month heard about buck and then buck2 and incorporated buck2 generator within shellb too. So honestly if you ask me, as of today I know most of the tools inside out, and have auto-generated build files for bazel and buck2. Thanks for the interest and the lovely question.