Show HN: Hancho – A simple and pleasant build system in ~500 lines of Python

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  • hancho

    A simple pleasant build system in Python.

  • piku

    The tiniest PaaS you've ever seen. Piku allows you to do git push deployments to your own servers.

  • I like it. I wrote Piku (https://github.com/piku/piku) with much the same interest in fixing some of my pains, so I get where you're coming from with this. Will drop it into one of my current projects to build ESP32 binaries :)

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  • oil

    Oils is our upgrade path from bash to a better language and runtime. It's also for Python and JavaScript users who avoid shell!

  • which works well. You don't have to clean when rebuilding variants. IMO this is 100% essential for writing C++ these days. You need a bunch of test binaries, and all tests should be run with ASAN and UBSAN.

    ---

    I wrote a mini-bazel on top of Ninja with these features:

    https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/10/garbage-collector.html...

    So it's ~1700 lines, but for that you get the build macros like asdl_library() generating C++ and Python (the same as proto_library(), a schema language that generates code)

    And it also correctly finds dependencies of code generators. So if you change a .py file that is imported by another .py file that is used to generated a C++ header, everything will work. That was one of the trickier bits, with Ninja implicit dependencies.

    I also use the Bazel-target syntax like //core/process

    This build file example mixes low level Ninja n.rule() and n.build() with high level r.cc_library() and so forth. I find this layering really does make it scale better for bigger projects

    https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/asdl/NINJA_subgr...

    Some more description - https://lobste.rs/s/qnb7xt/ninja_is_enough_build_system#c_tu...

  • tup

    Tup is a file-based build system.

  • Whenever looking at one these, I think back to the obscure but interesting "tup":

    “How is it so awesome? In a typical build system, the dependency arrows go down. Although this is the way they would naturally go due to gravity, it is unfortunately also where the enemy's gate is. This makes it very inefficient and unfriendly. In tup, the arrows go up.”

    https://gittup.org/tup/

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