ant+cpptasks vs. scons vs. make

Question

I\'m looking into scons and I just want to make sure I know what the alternatives are, before I invest a chunk of brain cells into something completely different. I\'ve been usi

Answer 1

I've been working on a project the past five years that does x86 and arm builds using ant. We tweaked cpptasks for our purposes to produce a generic compiler that we just pass in a prefix to...such as arm-gum-linux-gnueabi- and then that gets prepended to the actual tool such as g++ or ar or whatever. No prefix means you get the development platforms build tools. The toolchains for the cross compiling have those prefixes on their build tool binaries. Almost the entire reason for going with Ant rather than anything make based was cpptasks ability to do inremental builds and the uttter tangle of stuff that has to happen to keep autoconf happy. We are able to support the paradigm that almost any source file, particularly those in a folder tree structure for a library set, can be created/renamed/deleted and no edits need to happen to the build files. One little drawback is that linking files updates properties in a way that will cause an unnecessary rebuild.