Show HN: Bake – A modular build system and package manager for C/C++

Now, granted, only(?) seven of these are build systems proper...

- Bake has been used across platforms for large projects and its declarative approach held up pretty well. Note that being declarative does not mean a configuration cannot contain conditional attributes (which bake supports). You need conditionals for things to work properly on different platforms, like documented here: https://github.com/SanderMertens/bake#can-i-link-with-non-ba...

- I share the frustration, but I do not share your conclusion. Bake takes a refreshing approach to package management in that it doesn't try to do too much, which is perhaps what turned you off in other projects. It doesn't even compete with package managers like brew or vcpkg (which is not a build system, you might want to correct that). I would go into more detail, but then again I've already done so in a few comments, and the README is pretty comprehensive in explaining how it works.

- I did not invent my own syntax, the configuration is written plain JSON. Whether this was a good or bad decision we'll have to see, the jury is still out on that. NPM seems to do alright though.

So far, the people that have actually used bake have been unanimously positive. I can confidently state that the learning curve of bake is much lower than a tool like CMake or premake (which I like), let alone make or autotools. Based on the feedback of Bake's users I decided to spin off the project, as I figured others could benefit from it too. So yes, it is yet another tool, but IMHO there's little harm in that.

Autotools on Windows is an absolute nightmare and none of the other build systems have nearly as much support as CMake when it comes to integration with various tooling (as in tools which understand CMake).

I like gn, but it has the annoying problem of needing anything in-tree to be converted to gn.

You could have worded this in a MUCH more pleasant fashion and still gotten your point across. Why did you choose to humiliate?

Could you provide some pointers, ideally a link?

Regarding find_package; it does sound similar to bake's discovery. There is a not insignificant difference though between how both work in practice. Without going into too much depth, CMake attempts to find a package by looking at (a potentially large number of) system paths. It attempts to adhere as well as possible to the conventions of that platform.

On the other hand, bake recursively searches for projects from where it is being invoked, in addition to looking in a "bake environment". The latter is a self-contained, fixed-format directory structure that contains all projects built with bake. A bake environment is by default stored in a user's $HOME folder, but can be configured to (for example) /opt. Bake environments can be easily moved to different directories and even machines.

There is nothing inherently right or wrong with either approach, but they are certainly different. Bake's approach was designed to accommodate a scenario where a developer is working on a large number of (potentially shared) projects at the same time, and for that it works really well.

Bake has been used for well over 4 years (in various iterations) in big and small organizations. It held up pretty well for large-scale projects, though I should mention that, as with any tool, it can be misused. Big organizations in particular will have to establish conventions and guidelines around using bake, just as they would have to do with any other approach.

A minor detail: the table under Template Functions is not properly formatted and Github doesn't render it as a table.

In my opinion, CMake is best as a (meta)build system, leaving packaging details to a different layer.

A big difference with CMake is that bake stores package binaries, include files and metadata in a $HOME/bake directory. It won't actually install anything to /usr/local (or equivalent), unless you explicitly tell it to. Users typically first build everything to their $HOME/bake folder, and then when they want to make it available for all users, copy the contents of that folder to /opt when distributing the project.

Time will tell whether JSON scales, but so far it has held up pretty well. Bake has been used by small & big organizations, while building large numbers of packages simultaneously (150+). The most complex bake project.json I've seen was still far less verbose than the average CMake file (using CMake as a benchmark since it has been widely adopted).