Build system blues

Community
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I was trying to upgrade a single Makefile build system to something better. I just tried ocamlbuild, and omake, and I couldn’t get either to work for a medium sized project. I was hopeful with ocamlbuild but so far just invoking ocamlfind correctly from a Makefile seems to be the way for me. :joy: I also upgraded my justmake build system (a Makefile library that has patterns, recursive builds and all the GNU targets via automation, like automake) to use ocaml, it’s a work in progress. I’ll still post justmake later with an example build if I manage it, maybe it will be useful for somebody else.

Justmake used alternative build paths to be compatible with automake/autoconf, it supports specifying a build dir that is, but so if I can get that to work with complex projects that might be useful. The one build tool I’m glad with currently is ocamlfind, it seems fairly reliable.

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Would Dune (Jbuilder) work for you? Curious if you have tried it and whether it fits your use case.

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I haven’t really tried jbuilder yet.

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I did get justmake to work, it’s super fast. Might be interesting to try this for large projects, too. I’ll make sure I post an example here.

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I like that jbuildier is LISP-y, I really should try it given its popularity, it looked a bit idiosyncratic to me, but I bet it’s worth a try.