I don't see why not, but I see there are several computer science communities, maybe better post there. My instance's community search tells me !compsci@lemmy.world is somewhat active (by Lemmy standards).

LLMs love advertising / speechwriting techniques. Wikipedia has a good list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

If you use AI regularly these things are very very obvious.

That is incredible. Much of the specifics are beyond me, but the authors clearly enjoyed writing this piece!

ick

Make is fine unless you want to build on Windows. Then you kind of need something else.

I agree, you kind of need something else instead of Windows if you want to build software.

It is the very slow process creation infrastructure that kills Make as a tool on Windows.

s/Make as a tool on //

Give me a Make that

• properly handles filenames with arbitrary names (Make today breaks if filenames contain whitespace)
• uses space-based indentation level (Make today depends on the invisible difference between U+0008 TAB versus other whitespace, and refuses to process any other indentation)

Give me that, and... well, I'd probably still stick to current-day Make, because those improvements would cause my Makefiles to be backward incompatible. Make is just reliably available on pretty much any arbitrary system, unlike any candidate replacement.

Yes, it scales down to single files, and that is a common use case

This analysis was brutal and beautiful.

Alternatively, don't fix what ain't broken.

Yeah, turns out that I really REALLY want that .pdf purchase so I can put it on my own hard drive and not have it disappear and get deleted because daddy bezos says the license expired.

Fuck amazon.

I wish there were good alt-shells on Linux. Murex and Nushell are both still pretty nascent to actually use (not for portable scripts but just general day-to-day tasks) - and if it's something you care about it's annoying that Nushell is MIT-licensed instead of a free license, which kind of also precludes zsh.

I genuinely kind of miss working a job that required using Windows because PowerShell is genuinely nice to use for throwaway tasks and working in a shell to do things like parsing json, fetching data from a http server, whatever.

Yeah maybe, but usually if I'm using Make it's because my use case is "I want users to be able to build stuff without having to install any more build tools". The curse of network effects. That's the only reason I'd ever use Bash too. Otherwise I'd switch to Nushell in a second.

Can that scale down to individual .cpp files though? My understanding was that it works more at the package level.

Conan and vcpkg are the two big ones I'm familiar with, but some projects use CMake FetchContent (with github acting as the CDN/registry), and depending on your requirements you can also just use system package managers on Linux, maybe Homebrew or Nix/Guix, or more niche ones like Spack. I've seen projects packaged using self hosted Pacman registries, and that works surprisingly well.

There are? Where are the package registries? Could you give examples?

This is one that you can Google with filetype:pdf and it’ll come up immediately.

Literally shared from major universities, too!

Got mine in '92, I think. Still on my shelf.

You can find a paperback copy for under $12 with shipping, and the pdf version is widely available on the internet. The kindle version is purely a "I really want the kindle version" purchase.

It's still one of the best PL books. I learned C from it when I was 16, years before the web.

Thank you for the answer!

I have not previously heard Meson described as a reinvention of Cmake or a CMake clone, nor that it was meant to be. I would think that Meson being as opinionated as it is, including for example the fact that it does not and will not support user-defined functions, precludes it from being a CMake clone. It seems instead to be a build-system with a rather different philosophy and feature-set compared to Cmake. But if that philosophy or that feature-set does not match your needs, then there's obviously no reason to pick it over CMake

What breaks with npm in your case? In my experience it's been the rarest system to fail, like I can git clone something from 10 years ago, run npm i and the resulting app still builds and runs, despite a ton of announcements about deprecated libraries and update requests for vulnerability fixes.

Make still bests the author's examples in certain use cases. I use it all the time in those cases and it's fast and simple. Use the right tool for the job.

I was never convinced by Meson's value proposition. From what I remember, it was always just meant to reinvent CMake with a different DSL. Like, literally just CMake but slightly different.

I understand CMake's DSL isn't the prettiest, but as far as improving ergonomics of a build system, minimizing the amount of build scripts you write is far more effective than changing the syntax. If you find yourself writing too much CMake in a project, then switching to a build system with a different design (eg Bazel, Scons, Waf, ...) is probably the better choice.

And of course, since Meson is just a CMake clone, it's always going to be compared to it, and its always going to have to compete on features. On that front, CMake has always been ahead, and I don't see that changing. So in the end, Meson is just another example of that one XKCD meme about standards.

There should be a universal build system that is declarative, handles interdependent build steps, skips building outputs that are still fresh, but that checks freshness in a way that's more robust than tracking modification times, manages parallel execution intelligently, and that manages arbitrary external dependencies. Oh hey, it's Nix!

Out of curiosity, why do you consider CMake to be the better choice compared to Meson?

Personally I landed on Meson a few years ago, from what I remember chiefly due to simply not liking CMake's DSL and finding Meson easier to work with, despite needing to target a pretty old version for the sake of compatibility. Though Meson is definitely not perfect either; it's highly opinionated, and for example only recently got support for custom build targets putting stuff in sub-directories (as I discovered while writing this comment), so I'll personally be stuck with my workarounds for a good while longer