Posted by randerson_112 6 hours ago
Every time I wanted to start something new I'd spend the first hour writing CMakeLists.txt, figuring out find_package, copying boilerplate from my last project, and googling why my library isn't linking. By the time the project was actually set up I'd lost all momentum.
So, I built Craft - a lightweight build and workflow tool for C and C++. Instead of writing CMake, your project configuration goes in a simple craft.toml:
[project]
name = "my_app"
version = "0.1.0"
language = "c"
c_standard = 99
[build]
type = "executable"
craft add --git https://github.com/raysan5/raylib --links raylib
craft add --path ../my_library
craft add sfml
Other Craft features: craft init - adopt an existing C/C++ project into Craft or initialize an empty directory. craft template - save any project structure as a template to be initialized later. craft gen - generate header and source files with starter boilerplate code. craft upgrade - keeps itself up to date.
CMakeLists.extra.cmake for anything that Craft does not yet handle.
Cross platform - macOS, Linux, Windows.
It is still early (I just got it to v1.0.0) but I am excited to be able to share it and keep improving it.
Would love feedback. Please also feel free to make pull requests if you want to help with development!
This is now a build system generator generator. This is the wrong solution imho. The right solution is to just build a build system that doesn’t suck. Cmake sucks. Generating suck is the wrong angle imho.
Just alone reverse engineering the Xcode and Visual Studio project file formats for each IDE version isn't fun, but this "boring" grunt work is what makes cmake so valuable.
The core ideas of cmake are sound, it's only the scripting language that sucks.
Build systems don't plan to converge in the future =)
One nice feature of MSVC is that you can describe the linker dependencies in the source files (via #pragma comment(lib, ...)), this enables building fairly complex single-file tools trivially without a build system like this:
cl mytool.c
CMake is a combination of a warthog of a specification language, and mechanisms for handling a zillion idiosyncracies and corners cases of everything.
I doubt than < 10,000 lines of C code can cover much of that.
I am also doubtful that developers are able to express the exact relations and semantic nuances they want to, as opposed to some default that may make sense for many projects, but not all.
Still - if it helps people get started on simpler or more straightforward projects - that's neat :-)
C++ build system, at the core, boils down to calling gcc foo.c -o foo.obj / link foo.obj foo.exe (please forgive if I got they syntax wrong).
Sure, you have more .c files, and you pass some flags but that's the core.
I've recently started a new C++ program from scratch.
What build system did I write?
I didn't. I told Claude:
"Write a bun typescript script build.ts that compiles the .cpp files with cl and creates foo.exe. Create release and debug builds, trigger release build with -release cmd-line flag".
And it did it in minutes and it worked. And I can expand it with similar instructions. I can ask for release build with all the sanitize flags and claude will add it.
The particulars don't matter. I could have asked for a makefile, or cmake file or ninja or a script written in python or in ruby or in Go or in rust. I just like using bun for scripting.
The point is that in the past I tried to learn cmake and good lord, it's days spent learning something that I'll spent 1 hr using.
It just doesn't make sense to learn any of those tools given that claude can give me working any build system in minutes.
It makes even less sense to create new build tools. Even if you create the most amazing tool, I would still choose spending a minute asking claude than spending days learning arbitrary syntax of a new tool.