Soup VS spack

Interesting to see how it works in CMake. I have been working for a long time on a build system that (originally) was my best shot at a "Build system for modules". Would be curious of your thoughts: Soup Build

Been using modules extensively for the past 2 years to write my build system (which itself is focused on using modules). Writing modules themselves has been really easy, as long as the compilers doesnt hit any issues. Working within MSVC has become a lot better in the last 6 months to the point where I rarely see issues anymore. Every time I try to switch to Clang or GCC it seems to fail on the most simple examples, but I hear GCC has made some improvements lately.

It is a tool I threw together to help debug my build system internals. It is WinUI, so windows only for now, but I hope to migrate it to MAUI so it can run cross platform.

Great to see more people interested in this area! Just finished reading the readme and I am really curious how you are finding the Clang modules support. Last time I tried to use it it was still heavily mixed up with Clang Modules and not that great with modules-ts. I have written my own very similar project and landed on MSVC as my primary compiler since it has the best Modules support I have found. I will hopefully find some time tonight to play around with the project more, but here are some quick thoughts.

I am hoping the release the Beta soon: https://github.com/SoupBuild/Soup

Great writeup. I have been thinking about the problem of dependency management within C++ for a while now. I believe that without adoption of a build system that was designed to handle dependency resolution natively with modules, we will always require fragile manual integration steps. If you are interested, I wrote a blog post on what I believe it will take to create such a build system and am actively working on an implementation.

A build system aimed at collaboration across teams, languages and platforms. Started out as a basic attempt to take advantage of C++20 Modules, but grew from there: https://github.com/SoupBuild/Soup

> Are we talking about the same autotools?

Yes. Instead of figuring out how to do something particular with every single software package, I can do a --with-foo or --without-bar or --prefix=/opt/baz-1.2.3, and be fairly confident that it will work the way I want.

Certainly with package managers or (FreeBSD) Ports a lot is taken care of behind the scenes, but the above would also help the package/port maintainers as well. Lately I've been using Spack for special-needs compiles, but maintainer ease also helps there, but there are still cases one a 'fully manual' compile is still done.

> Suffice it to say, I prefer to work with handwritten makefiles.

Having everyone 'roll their own' system would probably be worse, because any "mysteriously failure" then has to be debugged specially for each project.

Have you tried Spack?

* https://spack.io

* https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Well, good luck with that, cause it's broken.

Previous release miscompiled Python [1]

Current release miscompiles bison [2]

[1] https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/38724

[2] https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/37172#issuecomment-181...

gh is available via Homebrew, MacPorts, Conda, Spack, Webi, and as a…

> I can't count the number of times I've seen people say "md5 is fine for use case xyz" where in some counterintuitive way it wasn't fine.

I can count many more times that people told me that md5 was "broken" for file verification when, in fact, it never has been.

My main gripe with the article is that it portrays the entire legal profession as "backwards" and "deeply negligent" when they're not actually doing anything unsafe -- or even likely to be unsafe. And "tech" knows better. Much of tech, it would seem, has no idea about the use cases and why one might be safe or not. They just know something's "broken" -- so, clearly, we should update.

> Just use a safe one, even if you think you "don't need it".

Here's me switching 5,700 or so hashes from md5 to sha256 in 2019: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/13185

Did I need it? No. Am I "compliant"? Yes.

Really, though, the main tangible benefit was that it saved me having to respond to questions and uninformed criticism from people unnecessarily worried about md5 checksums.

[1] https://github.com/spack/spack/blob/develop/var/spack/repos/...

In Spack [1] we can express all these constraints for the dependency solver, and we also try to always re-cythonize sources. The latter is because bundled cythonized files are sometimes forward incompatible with Python, so it's better to just regenerate those with an up to date cython.

[1] https://github.com/spack/spack/

You want to look at the tools used for HPC systems, these are generally very well tried and tested and can be setup for single machine usage. Remote access - we use ssh, but web interfaces such as Open On Demand exist - https://openondemand.org/. For managing Jobs, Slurm is currently the most popular option - https://slurm.schedmd.com/documentation.html. For a module system (to load software and libraries per user), Spack is a great - https://spack.io/. You might also want to consider containerisation options, https://apptainer.org/ is a good option.

git clone https://github.com/spack/spack.git ./spack/bin/spack install gcc