ctil VS Bazel

Since git tags are snapshots of entire repositories, my initial GitHub release contained archives of my source code. This was unacceptable as users only require the final compiled executable. To make my executable available I had to edit my release and drag-and-drop the compiled executable (compressed into a .ZIP archive) into the release:

After adding the template, my first build failed due to the following error:

Another task I completed this week in open source was contributing to Roy's project by adding some unit tests. This was my first time contributing open source code in C++, and I am glad that Roy reached out to collab with me since I've been mostly working with Python/Java/JavaScript these days and I wanted to step out of my comfort zone. Roy created an issue for the tests he required and I submitted my PR which he later merged :)

For this lab exercise, I had to select and setup a testing framework to my Markdown-to-HTML converter, ctil.

In my previous blog post on Code Reading, I read the codebase of Docusaurus to research how the project implements Syntax Highlighting for fenced code blocks. My research taught me that Docusaurus actually uses Prism-React-Renderer, a third-party library, to provide Syntax Highlighting. This knowledge was useful because I wanted to add syntax highlighting to ctil, my Markdown-to-HTML converter, but didn't want to implement the feature from scratch. Although I can't use Prism React Renderer in my own project, researching Docusaurus gave me the idea to find a Open Source library I could use.

Wow, if you curl it, there's a lot of boilerplate code there.

Maybe built using Bazel?

https://bazel.build

Bazel by Google

Luckily a feature to limit the disk cache size is in development: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/5139

This is a problem that Bazel (https://bazel.build) solves in a very convenient way. You can just keep using the paths relative to the repository root, and as long as you properly declare your test needs that file it will access it without problems. Or you can use the runfile libraries to access them too.

When doing research for this lab exercise I looked at both vcpkg and conan. Both are package managers that would automate the installation and configuration of my program with its dependencies. However, when it came to releasing and sharing my program my options were limited. For example, the central public registry for conan packages is conan-center, but these packages are curated and the process is very involved. There was no way conan-center would accept a class project like mine. Alternatively, I could host a conan package on a public Artifactory repository, but accessing the package requires users to add the repository to their conan remote. This already sounded like too many steps to expect regular users to follow - I already haven't setup any conan remotes, there's no way I could expect regular users to know about conan remotes, let alone have conan installed on their system. After discussing with people online and consulting my instructor, I ultimately decided to do a GitHub release. However, in the future I was encouraged to look into using CMake or bazel.

NOTE: I won’t mention SBT and Leiningen here because, with all due respect, they are niche build tools. I also won’t discuss Kobalt for the same reason (besides, it’s no longer actively maintained). Additionally, I won’t touch upon Bazel and Buck in this context, mainly because I’m not very familiar with them. If you have insights or comments about these tools, please feel free to share them in the comments 👇

> None of this solves C's only REAL problem (in my opinion) which is the lack of dependency management.

Bazel solves this really nicely, I know some people have strong opinions on it but I cannot recommend it enough

https://bazel.build/