[Caml-list] Announcing OMake 0.9.8.3; pre-announcing OMake 0.9.9 with automated C library wrapping for OCaml
Aleksey Nogin
OMake 0.9.8.3 ("stable") and pre-announce that OMake 0.9.9 ("unstable")
is expected to be released within a week.
OMake is a build system designed for scalability and portability. It
uses a syntax similar to make utilities you may have used, but it
features many additional enhancements, including the following.
- Support for projects spanning several directories or directory
hierarchies.
- Fast, reliable, automated, scriptable dependency analysis using MD5
digests, with full support for incremental builds.
- Fully scriptable, includes a library that providing support for
standard tasks in C, C++, OCaml, and LaTeX projects, or a mixture
thereof.
Often, a configuration file is as simple as a single line
.DEFAULT: $(OCamlProgram prog, foo bar baz)
which states that the program "prog" is built from the files foo.ml,
bar.ml, and baz.ml. This one line will also invoke the default
standard library scripts for discovering implicit dependencies in
OCaml files.
- Full native support for rules that build several files at once.
- Portability: omake provides a uniform interface on Linux/Unix
(including 64-bit architectures), Win32, Cygwin, Mac OS X, and other
platforms that are supported by OCaml.
- Built-in functions that provide the most common features of programs
like grep, sed, find, and awk. These are especially useful on Win32.
- Active filesystem monitoring, where the build automatically restarts
whenever you modify a source file. This can be very useful during
the edit/compile cycle.
- A built-in command-interpreter osh that can be used interactively.
OMake preserves the style of syntax and rule definitions used in
Makefiles, making it easy to port your project to OMake. There is no
need to code in Perl (cons), or Python (scons). However, there are a few
things to keep in mind:
1. Indentation is significant, but tabs are not required.
2. The OMake language is functional: functions are first-class and
there are no side-effects apart from I/O.
3. Scoping is dynamic.
OMake is licensed under a mixture of the GNU GPL license (OMake engine
itself) and the MIT-like license (default configuration files).
Additional information and extensive documentation can be found on OMake
Home Page at http://omake.metaprl.org/
OMake version 0.9.8.3 is a minor feature enhancements and bugfixes
release. The changes in this version include:
- Made it easy to define default ("implicit") rules for phony targets.
- Detect case-insensitive filesystems on Unix-like operating systems
(especially important under Mac OS X).
- A number of performance improvements.
- Documentation improvements.
For a more verbose change log, please visit
http://omake.metaprl.org/changelog.html#0.9.8.3 .
Source and binary packages of OMake 0.9.8.3 may be downloaded from
http://omake.metaprl.org/download.html . In addition, OMake may be
obtained via the GODI packaging system.
To try it out, run the command "omake --install" in a project directory,
and modify the generated OMakefile.
Even though we call it "stable", OMake 0.9.8.3 should still be
considered an alpha release. While we have made an effort to ensure that
it is bug-free, it is possible some functions may not behave as you
would expect. Please report any comments and/or bugs to the mailing list
om...@metaprl.org and/or at http://bugzilla.metaprl.org/
OMake 0.9.9 will feature a large number of major changes that Jason
Hickey have been working on for the last two years. These changes include:
* Completely redesigned variable naming semantics aimed at making sure
that similarly named unrelated variables from different source
files do not clash.
* Optional ("keyword") arguments to functions.
* An option to use an alternative "programming-language-style" syntax,
where all string constants have to be quoted, but variable and
function references do not have to use the $(...) syntax.
* Dynamic loading of C libraries, including:
- Tools for automated creation of OCaml wrappers to C libraries by
parsing the C header files.
- As an example, _automatically generated_ OCaml and OMake wrappers
for the GTK library.
- As a demo for the above, an OMake GUI capable of presenting a
browseable dependency tree, and much more.
* And many other features (much more complete and detailed list will
accompany the release).
--
Aleksey Nogin, Research Scientist
Advanced Technologies Department, Information & System Sciences Lab
HRL Laboratories, LLC, Malibu, CA
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