electionguard-cpp VS ninja

I started off by trying to recreate the problem with another program I was working on, ElectionGuard, which was where I first encountered CPM. I set an empty environment variable for CPM_SOURCE_CACHE and tried building it, but I didn't get any errors related to CPM because I realized the MakeFile's definition of CPM_SOURCE_CACHE was overriding the one I set. I changed this to be empty and tried again, but it still built with no CPM issues.

Aside from Pataro, I've been poking at ElectionGuard and CPM.cmake as well. Both of them are pretty much at the same status, which is - built and ready to be worked on - but the logic of how to do so completely eludes me.

The first I worked on was ElectionGuard, which is an SDK that performs ballot encryption and verification functions for digital elections. I've been trying to build it for a few days now but had been unsuccessful so far. I started by installing GNU Make, Chocolatey, and MSYS2. I went through a lot of trial and error with CMake, including erroneously thinking my build worked when I searched for a .sln and found an included one that ended up being in C#. I eventually got Ninja as well which was listed as a requirement somewhere, and with all the tools in place I gave it another shot.

Under the hood, Rescript uses a build system called Ninja. Ninja is similar to Make, but cross-platform and more minimal/performant.

Really? I thought most new projects were switching to ninja[^1] and have never used it.

[^1]: https://ninja-build.org/

warning: Starting with the September 2023 release, the default triplet for vcpkg libraries will change from x86-windows to the detected host triplet (x64-windows). To resolve this message, add --triplet x86-windows to keep the same behavior. Computing installation plan... The following packages will be built and installed: * egl-registry:x86-windows -> 2022-09-20 glew:x86-windows -> 2.2.0#3 * opengl:x86-windows -> 2022-12-04#3 * opengl-registry:x86-windows -> 2022-09-29#1 * vcpkg-cmake:x64-windows -> 2023-05-04 * vcpkg-cmake-config:x64-windows -> 2022-02-06#1 Additional packages (*) will be modified to complete this operation. Detecting compiler hash for triplet x86-windows... A suitable version of powershell-core was not found (required v7.2.11) Downloading portable powershell-core 7.2.11... Downloading powershell-core... https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.2.11/PowerShell-7.2.11-win-x86.zip->C:\vcpkg\downloads\PowerShell-7.2.11-win-x86.zip Downloading https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.2.11/PowerShell-7.2.11-win-x86.zip Extracting powershell-core... error: while detecting compiler information: The log file content at "C:\vcpkg\buildtrees\detect_compiler\stdout-x86-windows.log" is: -- Downloading https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/releases/download/v1.10.2/ninja-win.zip -> ninja-win-1.10.2.zip... -- Configuring x86-windows CMake Error at scripts/cmake/vcpkg_execute_required_process.cmake:112 (message): Command failed: C:/vcpkg/downloads/tools/ninja/1.10.2-windows/ninja.exe -v Working Directory: C:/vcpkg/buildtrees/detect_compiler/x86-windows-rel/vcpkg-parallel-configure Error code: 1 See logs for more information: C:\vcpkg\buildtrees\detect_compiler\config-x86-windows-rel-CMakeCache.txt.log C:\vcpkg\buildtrees\detect_compiler\config-x86-windows-out.log

I thought I would share my custom installer script for the latest GitHub versions of CMake, Ninja, and Meson.

Now that you have your build system all generated you can go ahead and build everything. By default Meson will use Ninja as the build tool. Ninja is similar to Make but much much faster. You can also generate additional build systems but that's outside of the scope of this post.

There are also some other tools like https://ninja-build.org/ that you might prefer using instead

I got Ninja from https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja, latest release. I'm assuming this is a false positive?

Oh excellent, then better (and more portable!) tools are available:

http://pants.build

https://ninja-build.org

https://buck.build

and, if you hate yourself: https://bazel.build