Hammer

Build system based on Boost.Build v2 ideas, but written in C++ and trying to be user and tools friendly as much as possible. It uses similar to BBv2 script language, but without any control flow instructions + named arguments for rule invocations. Second, major, deference is that things like

sources
requirements
usage requirements
conditions in requirements and usage requirements
features
paths
target definitions
target references

are first class objects in language and therefore generated error messages are (can be, work in progress :) ) very descriptive and precise:

Example file

exe test : main.cpp : <foo>bar ;
feature link ;
exe test : main.cpp : @<source>(@foo);
exe test : main.cpp /boost/* ;

local glob ./*.cpp ;
explicit glob ./.cpp ;

Output

hammer/examples/errors/hamfile:1:24: error: Argument 'requirements': Unknown feature 'foo'
exe test : main.cpp : <foo>bar ;
                       ^
hammer/examples/errors/hamfile:2:9: error: Feature 'link' already defined
feature link ;
        ^
hammer/examples/errors/hamfile:3:33: error: Argument 'requirements': Public target is not allowed here
exe test : main.cpp : @<source>(@foo);
                                ^
hammer/examples/errors/hamfile:4:21: error: Argument 'sources': Wildcards not allowed in target reference
exe test : main.cpp /boost/* ;
                    ^
hammer/examples/errors/hamfile:6:1: error: Only target definition can be local
local glob ./*.cpp ;
^
hammer/examples/errors/hamfile:7:1: error: Only target definition can be explicit
explicit glob ./.cpp ;
^

How to try it

Download release from Github.
Unpack it somewhere in a PATH.
Create user-config.ham
Setup libs warehouse
Building examples
Building Hammer by Hammer

Configuration

When you run hammer it will try to load configuration file placed at:

Linux: $HOME/user-config.ham
Window: %USERPROFILE%\user-config.ham

In this config file you can configure your toolsets and warehouse. By default hammer will try to autoconfigure. This means it will try to find usable toolsets at predefined paths and configure them for usage. Currently it knows only gcc and msvc toolsets.

Autoconfiguration will try to do the following:

on Linux: If /usr/bin/gcc exists configure gcc-system toolset.
on Windows: search at:
- C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\VC
- C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\VC
- C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC

and configure msvc-11.0/msvc-12.0/msvc-14.0 respectively.

If you have other gcc version in default location you can configure it by writing one-liner in user-config.ham:

use-toolset-gcc 5.4 ;

For msvc you need to instruct hammer like this

use-tooset-msvc 27.0 : "D:\\Development\\Microsoft Visual Studio 27.0\\VC" ;

Warehouse

Warehouse is collection of libraries/packages that hammer can download and provide to developer similar to how other programming language package managers does. To configure warehouse you should put this line into user-config.ham:

setup-warehouse libs : "https://dl.bintray.com/darkangel-ua/hammer" ;

This line will add a batch of Boost libraries plus some others. Because hammer use external tools to download and unpack packages there is some additional dependencies you need, to be able to use it:

Linux: tar, bunzip2, curl - probably every Linux distributions has installed by default.
Windows: Same here - tar.exe, bunzip2.exe and curl.exe. You need to download and put them (+dependencies) in a PATH. They can be downloaded from:
- cURL - you need version with SSL support.
- tar
- bzip2

Examples

The root folder has 'examples' directory where couple of simple examples placed. Try to build them to verify that everything configured and you can actualy build something. All build artifacts will be deep in '.hammer' folder. Hammer uses MD5 hashes to ensure that different builds will not interfere with each others, so path to final so/dll/lib/exe will be a bit cryptic and it begins with '.hammer'. On linux system it looks like hidden file, so be aware.

One thing that you need to know is when compiling examples/use-lib-from-warehouse Hammer should ask about downloading a batch of libs. Just press 'Y' and [Return] :)

Building Hammer by Hammer

If you was able to build examples/use-lib-from-warehouse than it's time to build Hammer using Hammer :) You need one more thing - you have to create hamroot file alognside with hammer sources folder

   ├── hammer
   │   ├── ast
   │   ├── core
   │   ├── core_objects
   │   ├── doc
   │   ├── driver
   │   ├── examples
   │   ├── hamfile
   │   ├── parscore
   │   ├── parser
   │   ├── README.md
   │   └── sema
   └── hamroot

with one-liner:

use-project /hammer : ./hammer ;

This will create global target alias /hammer that needs to be somewhere defined because all build scripts references different part of hammer sources using global references like /hammer/core or /hammer/parser