Mirror of forum.nim-lang.org

9230 :: The most common Nim build system for which we'd go

• mardiyah (orginal) [2022-06-13T14:59:46+02:00] view original

  What actually is common Nim build system, so then we can figure out how to convert autotools build system C project into a suitable Nim build system equivalence ? Let project be small or medium size/complexity

---

• PMunch (orginal) [2022-06-13T15:03:41+02:00] view original

  Most common is probably Nimble. You can add your own tasks to do various things. I've also used Makefiles for some of my projects, and there was a project called Nakefile, but I don't think that's still maintained.

---

• arnetheduck (orginal) [2022-06-13T15:13:24+02:00] view original

  We're currently using https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-build-system which organizses a collection of utilities around make and friends - it lets us control a number of things that are important for project of our size:

  • reproducible builds such that two developers working on the project can expect the build to work
  • control over dependencies so as to avoid supply chain attacks
  • parallelization of compilation across nim files (ie when compiling multiple binaries, the compilation should happen in parallel)
  • common build options (like LTO)

  Compared to autotools, you'll notice that there's no well-established workflow for compile-time feature detection (which headers are installed etc) - the easiest option, if you're keeping the C code, might actually be to let autotools and friends do its job, compile the code to a static library and then import that.

  If your project is small, using nim itself without extras might be enough - see for example https://github.com/arnetheduck/nim-sqlite3-abi which uses {.compile.} directives which ends up being a crude build system of its own.

---