Besides the rather long title, I'm here to post the introduction of my Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) meta-build system project. This blog exists to display my efforts on GSoC projects, my first being the SDL meta-build system. I'll briefly go over the project and, in subsequent days/weeks/months, I will continue to post my efforts as I construct a meta-build system.
Overview of Meta-Build Systems
First of all, what is a meta-build system? Imagine creating a new project (regardless of the language, but we can specifically reference C for the sake of SDL) and you're working mainly with one platform...say GNU/Linux on a 64-bit architecture. You're using makefiles with gcc, knowing various aspects of compiling 64-bit C applications using gcc (such as a long being 8 bytes). But eventually, you decide that you want your application to be buildable on multiple platforms, say Win64. So you have a few options: you could create a Visual Studio project to house your project (recreating the efforts of your earlier makefiles), or you could install MinGW or Cygwin and try to hack your earlier makefiles into working on Windows in those stripped environments, to name a few. Nevertheless, a very annoying pattern arises: every platform, architecture, and even compiler that you want to target will require unique parameters and build settings. Many platform-based build systems allow for multiple configurations to handle different compilers and, with a little work, also different architectures.
The problem is targeting many platforms without having to continue redoing the build systems for each one. This can be done in a decent manner if you are using the same Integrated Development Environment across each platform (such as Eclipse, which is platform-independent). Configuring the project files to properly build across many platforms can be a real pain, though. Beyond that, many people who may use your project likely prefer their own setup (ie, some people will prefer using Visual Studio on windows to trying makefiles with Cygwin or MinGW).
What option do we have then?
The answer is a meta-build system. It is thusly named because it builds/generators build files. Generating build files seems like a neat concept, but we need to be critical the build system is adequate for what we want. It has to satisfy various criteria:
- It must be platform-independent, at least to each platform our application is going to target
- It must be easily extensible, incase we need to implement per-project build options (such as searching for dependencies)
- Ideally, it should be portable so it can be packaged with the project's source code on some Version Control System (like SVN or GIT)
I won't go into depth about various meta-build systems, but I am going to highlight premake here. From my experience, premake massively satisfies the above conditions. It's platform-independent (source code is available), it's extensible (uses lua to create build generation scripts), and it's portable (doesn't require any additional dependencies to support lua) and works out of the box. It can also target most major desired platforms.
Premake has its cons, though this can and will be mitigated throughout the project. There are other meta-build systems available, but I feel as though premake is the best option for SDL (especially given its size and magnitude), plus it's proved to be a dependable option. It's the system of choice for SDL.
SDL and Premake
As mentioned, I am deciding to use premake as the meta-build system for SDL. SDL currently maintains various Visual Studio projects for building on windows, an XCode project for MacOSX, and cmake files for other build targets. There is a need to consolidate all of the different build targets into a single system, to increase maintainability (change one to change all, versus having to actually go and change all), portability (cmake requires installation prior to use, making it very inconvenient), and flexibility (again, lua). Integrating a lightweight meta-build system was the answer, so premake was the choice.
The goal of this project is to create a single premake setup which slowly replaces each of the targeted platforms of SDL, possibly with the chance of adding more platforms per-choice of the user. SDL currently targets a plethora of platforms, including Linux 32/64, Windows using MSVC, Windows using Cygwin or MinGW, MacOSX and iOS, and android, to name some. As a result, supporting each individual platform is a goal in itself, and will require overcoming one of premake's cons: searching for dependencies.
In the coming weeks, I hope to post more regarding the dependencies of each of SDL's build targets, thus categorizing and organizing what the replacement premake lua script will need to be able to support. Additional research will need to be taken into how the Visual Studio and XCode projects are setup, plus what sort of dependencies the CMake scripts look for and how that can be replaced by lua with premake.
That's all I have for now. Feel free to comment or post any questions on the SDL Developer Mailing List, or as a comment on this blog.
Cheers.
