[CMake] CMake with Lua Experiment

[Brandon Van Every]

On Nov 27, 2007 11:35 AM, Ken Martin <ken.martin at kitware.com> wrote:
> I doubt seriously we will adopt a second language in CMake. There is no
> question of maintaining the current language. It has to and will be kept in
> CMake. It was very easy to add Lua to CMake which is nice (literally it was
> probably 15 hours of effort). Part of this experiment was to see if it was
> even programtically practical to add a second language. It turns out it is.
> Doing a complete nice integration would be pretty easy except for variables
> and syntax. That is where the two approaches significantly differ and as
> others have posted that is one place where CMake currently does not scale
> well. For those of us accustomed to functions and local variables the macro
> command is not quite right. We do need to address the variable/scope issue
> in CMake and I am sure we will. Starting from scratch I would use Lua for
> all the benefits a mature language provides, but adding it (or transitioning
> to it) I *suspect* is not worth it. (although part of me thinks in the long
> ten-year-out view it is worth it) Sometimes these issues take a while to
> gel.

Sounds like me arguing with myself about whether I could adopt a dog.
"Oh I live in a tiny apartment."  Well that didn't turn out to be
important.

I think the syntax for any CMake embedded language has to handle
variable length input.  Lists of stuff are so common in a build system
that the language should handle them gracefully.  I don't know enough
about Lua to know whether this is natural in it.  It's definitely not
natural in C++ and I wouldn't choose C++ for specifying a build
system.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every