[CMake] CMake and Lua

Brandon Van Every bvanevery at gmail.com
Wed Feb 27 21:21:53 EST 2008


On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 8:58 PM, Bill Hoffman <bill.hoffman at kitware.com> wrote:
> Brandon Van Every wrote:
>
>  > That's 2 cantankerous languages and a rather general problem domain.
>  > CMake script is a rather limited language.  Not that hard to map it to
>  > Lua.
>
>  I don't know, I have heard about people using CMake for a general
>  purpose language....  :)
>
>  I don't think I have any idea what every single project using CMake is
>  doing with the language.

Only thing problematic I could see, is if someone's getting clever and
using CMake script to generate CMake script.  I think it would be
reasonable to make such people untangle their metaprogramming.

>  It would be much safer and easier to continue
>  to support it in the core of CMake.

It's 2x work to support CMake script and Lua indefinitely.

>  I just don't believe that
>  translation can work, and the fun part is that it can't even be proved
>  that the translator works 100% of the time...

That's not a realistic concern though.  You will either decide to move
on to Lua or you won't.  Any amount of excuses can be invented if you
aren't willing.

That's how I lost the Chicken Scheme project BTW.  Lotsa excuses about
how the CMake build "wasn't ready" or "was buggy" for some reason,
even though it proved itself in the field for 6 months without any
real problems.  Certainly no more problems than anyone has with a
near-perfect build maintained in any language over the same time
period.  The Chicken Scheme author simply didn't want to get his hands
dirty with CMake.  He also tended to call every other piece of open
source software "buggy," except for Chicken Scheme of course.

If I learned nothing else from that project, I learned about political
will.  There are technology problems and there are political problems.
 I can't solve those here.  I can only agitate in a certain direction,
point out what is possible, and knock down perceived barriers.  I hope
that in coming years you will consider the various technical merits
and demerits of Lua.  Perhaps someday, it will become your idea.  Then
you'll be more interested in automatic translation.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every


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