sml VS just

Anyway the need is not complicated, I need both entry and exit functions from every state, optionally allowing these functions to be coroutines (that's special sauce but for later), and an explicit state transition table which also have a way to say that a state can be accessed at any point. Also allow states to be state machines, optional FSM hierarchies. If you ignore the coroutine stuff it's pretty standard features these days, except that - Boost.MSM is quite archaic now (it was so novel when it was first released...) although it allows most of the features I talked about, I just think it will complicate my code unneecessarilly; - Boost-Ext.SML (not Boost) is almost perfect except it doesnt have entry/exit functions on states for some reason. Also last time we (as in in livestream) tried it in prototypes it didnt compile on msvc XD - Boost-Ext.SML2 is even better but still doesnt have entry/exit functions although it's in the plans.

Hello all. Being a huge fan of state machine and coroutines, I have been browsing around for examples of what other people do combine these two. I have been using boost-ext/sml for quite many projects and are quite happy about that. But when transitioning to code that relies on coroutines, I would like to write entry/exit/actions/guard methods that uses coroutines and where I can co_await on awaitables from Asio and more recently "Boost Async".

boost-ext/sml: quite modern way of doing state machines using a DSL

I recently was troubleshooting a crash that backtraced through the boost::sml library [0]. The crash didn't actually have anything to do with the library, but it was used as the core event loop.

The backtrace -- as in, just the output from running `bt` in GDB -- was over a thousand wrapped lines long. There were ~5 stack frames that took up 200 lines of console each to print just the function name. That product's debug builds recently hit the 2GB line, which is enough that old versions of binutils complain.

I don't know what the solution is. There's some really neat stuff you can do with template metaprogramming, and in stripped release builds it compiles down extremely tiny. Plus the code is very clean to read. But it does feel like there isn't any kind of central vision for the C++ debugging experience, and bad interactions between highly-complex modern C++ typing, the compiler, and the debugger are probably only going to get worse unless somebody (the ISO committee? Vendors?) thinks really hard about debugging support.

[0]: https://github.com/boost-ext/sml

I'm a big fan of MSM but what you're experiencing is pretty normal for template-heavy libraries built on C++03 machinery (emulation of variadic templates is the usual culprit). It's probably not the answer you're hoping for, but the real solution is to switch to a library with more modern foundations. (I've been happily using [Boost::ext].SML for a few years but I'm reluctant to strongly recommend anything in particular since I haven't re-explored the problem space since I found it.)

The Boost one that you mention, seems to be one that it's kinda old. A "successor" of sorts is Boost SML. I've not used it yet, but certainly the first impressions are very good.

Or Boost.Sml

At our company, we rely a lot on https://github.com/boost-ext/sml

I'm a big fan of boost::sml for representing state machines.

https://github.com/boost-ext/sml (State Machine DSL and backend for perfomance)

I don't like makefiles, but I've been enjoying justfiles: https://github.com/casey/just

I started using just [0] on my projects and have been very happy so far. It is very similar to make but focused on commands rather than build outputs.

Define your recipes and then you can compose them as needed.

[0] https://github.com/casey/just

just - https://github.com/casey/just

Welp there is absolute chaos in that thread -- guess it's not an April Fools joke.

I wonder if relying on CI for anything other than provisioning machines is a mistake -- maybe we should have never moved from doing things from local scripts written in $LANGUAGE.

That said, I'm probably biased since I'm a massive fan of things like `make` and more appropriately for the current age, `just`[0]

[0]: https://github.com/casey/just

> When a command has some cognitive requirements I create a script with some ${1:-default} values and I store them all in $PATH enabled local/bin

I would consider using just for this:

https://github.com/casey/just

Your coworker's experience is more principled: Make is a mediocre tool for executing commands. It wasn't ever designed for that. Although it is pretty common to see what you are mentioning in projects because it doesn't require installing a dependency.

For a repo where an easy to install (single binary) dependency is a non-issue, consider using just. [1] You get `just -l` where you can see all the command available, the ability to use different languages, and overall simpler command writing.

[1] https://github.com/casey/just

This is fantastic, but I'd say that this solution is somewhat in response to this open issue from 2019:

https://github.com/casey/just/issues/429

I really wish just was included as a package in distributions.

So far, I didn't work on new features at all but on stabilizing the ground for further development: 1. CMake lists and modules were rewritten a lot, now managing builds and their configurations is much lesser pain. 2. Brought in Justfile for regular tasks, and it's great, no less. 3. Linters, formatters, analyzers for almost all the code (except for Janet for now, as because of it being a niche and young technology, it didn't get enough attention yet). 4. ECS stub. Now runtime class doesn't look like a god object. 5. Started writing unit tests which didn't happen with my personal projects before and maybe indicates how serious am I about this one :D 6. Some of previously hardcoded data has been moved to INI files. Now, if I release the game in 10 years, and in 10 more years some eccentric person decides to make a variant of it, it will be slightly simpler.

i've grown to like this for my personal projects. https://github.com/casey/just