[CMake] CMake and Lua => DSL!?

Brandon Van Every bvanevery at gmail.com
Sun Mar 2 14:39:24 EST 2008


On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 2:30 PM, Reinhold <reinholdsw at gmx.at> wrote:
 > Hello everyone,
 >
 >  Sorry for the quick interruption, but somehow I have the feeling this
 >  discussion will start again and again and again, if it has ever appeared
 >  to end. Here are my two cents...
 >
 >  IMHO there might be a misunderstanding concerning Kitware's CMake
 >  strategy: It is a domain specific language (DSL) for -- as this might
 >  indicate -- one specific purpose and therefore, by intention, not a
 >  general purpose (scripting) language; thus it concentrates correctly on
 >  its (single & powerful) core task/challenge. An estimated set of 7% of
 >  CMake's language commands covers about 97% of the usual cases. (Note
 >  that I have not even thought about thinking about this numbers.)
 >
 >  Please accept this as an almost completely serious "feed to a never
 >  ending (?) discussion",

 When I say the technical merit of Python, Ruby, or Lua over CMake
 script has not been demonstrated, it is speaking to this very point.
 Perhaps general purpose scripting *is* provably better for a large
 scale build, but I would like to see a large scale project that proves
 that, rather than assuming it.

 From a marketing and documentation standpoint, standard scripting
 languages are provably better than DSLs.


 Cheers,
 Brandon Van Every


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