adgasf

System package managers rarely offer all of the packages you need.

The question is: is this thing inherently complex or is it more complicated than it needs to be?

In software there are many things that are more complex than they need to be.

The argument against that is that if sellers cannot increase prices in times of crisis they have no incentive to stockpile for such events. This leads to shortages and even higher prices on an unregulated black-market.

I'm not saying that I buy this line of reasoning, but there's the counter-argument.

Ninja is an optimized back-end for other build-systems (including but not limited to CMake). It's not really intended to be used directly.

I am definitely not hinting at CMake!

Better options are Bazel, Buck and Please. Please is the most light-weight option.

Makefiles are too low level to be convenient for anything other than simple projects on one platform.

Not at all. The class definition syntax is very terse and you can use the mutable keyword for imperative programming.

In fact, I think F# is a better imperative language than C#, if you choose to use it that way.

Sad to see no mention of the impure ML languages (OCaml, F#, PureScript, etc). For me these strike a great balance between powerful abstractions and the ability to throw things together.

Can anyone help explain if Rust asyncs are hot (as in JavaScript, C++) or cold (as in F#)?

It does automatically start the tasks. JavaScript asyncs are "hot". You can simulate "cold" asyncs using a function, as you describe, but in other languages this is how they work by default.

OP was suggesting that systems like Bazel are harder to get started with but pay off with larger, more complex builds. However, I am claiming that Bazel is also good for the simple cases.

Does Bazel break up these steps automatically under the hood?

It could, in theory.

Doesn't Bazel hash the compiler and env variables to prevent this?

The only way to poison the cache then is to break things at an OS level, which is highly unlikely.

> bazel works better if you have 1 library per header

What do you mean?

Except the Bazel syntax is really good. Compiling a few C++ files into a binary is just:

    cc_binary(
      name = "app",
      srcs = glob([ "*.hpp", "*.cpp" ]),
    )

That's more concise than most build systems AND it's cross-platform.

Windows support seems to be very lacking.

Do you review all of the source-code that you run? If you trust the source-code due to its origin, why not trust a binary?

It works in the best sense (no dev prompt, does not require cygwin)

Bazel already works on Windows.

Meson does not have the same feature set as Bazel. Most notably sandboxing and remote execution.

Before it comes up: Bazel ships with its own copy of the JVM so you do not need to install Java to use it.

Bazel is more popular, with a larger community and better language support than the other two. It seems that Bazel has "won".

Can you link to the project?

Read this https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/06/my-boris-story/

It's free but the quality of search results is very poor.

People love to bash Electron, but what is the alternative?

Is there any other platform that provides:

- Support for the 3 major desktop platforms from one code-base;

- A decent choice of high-level programming languages (there are excellent compile-to-JS options now);

- Reasonable tooling and community support;

- MIT (or similar) license

Apple needs to allow you to change the default apps (similar to how you can change the keyboard) for this argument to hold up.

As C# gradually becomes F#, I have to wonder, why not just use F#?

OOP is not idiomatic F#. It is mostly for interop with C#.

Hopefully we will see this one day: https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-suggestions/issues/243