This is a script for simplifying C/C++ compilation. It's meant to be copied into
a project and used from there. It's written in Perl and should work on most
Unix-based operating systems (not Windows.) It should work with most Make
implementations, and supported compilers include GCC, Clang, and TinyCC.
(Compilers must support the -MD and -MF options. This may exclude some old
versions, I don't know.)
Say you wanted to make the optimized build of a project whose source files were
in the source directory. You could put this in your Makefile:
optimized-executable: source/*
@./build-objects -s source -b build/O3 -j auto $(CC) -O3 $(CPPFLAGS) $(CFLAGS)
$(CC) -o $@ $(LDFLAGS) build/O3/*.o $(LDLIBS)
(The @ before the script invocation is optional.)
optimized-executable will be rebuilt whenever a file in source changes. The
unlinked objects and other intermediate files will be placed in build/O3,
which will be created if it does not exist. -j auto will tell the script to
use all available processors for compilation. If there were a file f.c to
compile, it would be compiled like so:
$(CC) -O3 $(CPPFLAGS) $(CFLAGS) -MD -MF build/O3/f.c.d -c -o build/O3/f.c.o source/f.c
The build directory can be safely removed when cleaning up.
For more information, run ./build-objects --help or read the source code.
- While compilation and dependency handling can be done purely in a Makefile, using this script is probably more portable and requires less boilerplate.
- Supporting multiple optimization levels/configurations is easy with this script; just use separate build directories. Using pure Make to do this would again be more complex, as far as I know.
- The script only supports a simple project structure: all the compilation units must be in a single source directory. This setup is common enough for the script to be useful, but larger, more complex projects may not be supported.
- Using the format of the example above, removing a file will not trigger a rebuild. This is bad, though I doubt it will be a problem very often at all. (When a rebuild does occur, orphaned object files are deleted to prevent old code from being linked into the final executable.)
- While I think the code is portable, I haven't tested except on the few computers I own.
This is based on my other project jdibs, except that it doesn't do its own slow dependency detection and is generally simpler and easier to use.