HammockBuilder

An experimental library for creating build systems in Haskell

How does it work?

Well, it doesn’t yet, it is still in early early development.

But when it is done it will look something like this:

import Hammock
main = hammockMain $ project "HelloWorld" $ do
         output_dir "bin"
         exe "simple_01" $ do
           cpp "src/main.cpp"
           cpp "src/bar.cpp"
         exe "simple_foo" $ do
           cpp "src/foo.cpp

Does the world really need this?

Yes! Well, no, probably not. At the very least it probably won’t do too much damage.

I became motivated to start playing with build systems after CMake started to gain traction. The reason is that I dislike CMake, but less than I dislike Autotools. But it inspired me start making Hammock, in the faint hope that it will help improve the state of build systems.

Will this make a difference? It might if my observations about the psychology of the open source world are correct. The open source community tends to have a sort of delayed-amplified-echo effect. A single vital tool, such as source control or web a framework, will sit as the single and sole system for a long time. After a while, someone realizes how terrible this outdated system is and creates a new one. This causes a massive surge of interest in that sub field for a while, and after a short period, a massive explosion of new tools and libraries burst onto the scene.

Look at version control. CVS was king for a long time, and it was terrible. People didn’t realize how terrible until Subversion came along and replaced it across the board. But in the wake of SVN, we got a population boom: Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, Fossil, Darcs. Each generation improving upon the previous ones. Now look at the web. For quite a while, Perl/CGI was all we had. Then PHP came out, and it changed everything, flawed as it was. And recently, an explosion: Rails, Django, Lift, Node.js, Aleph, Cake and a hundred others.

I am hoping that this pattern is starting again, this time with build systems. I think that CMake might be the Subversion or PHP of build systems, a bright but flawed spark that ignites the attention and creativity of the open source community. And I am going to do everything I can to fan those flames. HammockBuilder is my first breath.

• Note: I am aware that I am not the first or only person working on a build system, and in the above examples are not listed in chronological order. Rather they are listed in the order that I observed them rise to prominence, which is subjective.

Anything else?

I have been struggling with Monads. I needed a problem which was easy enough that I could solve it, but non-trivial enough that I could really explore it. It just so happened that this problem fit the bill. I suppose in Haskell style I should call this a “Monadic Build System.”

Is this the end-all be all of build systems?

Absolutely not, it is a small stepping stone which will hopefully show of one or two neat ideas. I wouldn’t really expect a Haskell based library to take off anyway, not while Python and C are so widely supported. I am already planning my next version, either Python or C/Lua based, which should be even more exciting. But one step at a time.