Wall decals bleeding

[dpJudas]

There's two kinds of lazy.
First, the one where you won't do some things because they are time consuming and not really necessary (like not cleaning the house every week, when doing it once a month is really enough.)
Second, the kind where you make your life miserable by not investing a minor amount of time to solve a problem that'll bite you in the ass later.

This clearly is the second kind of 'lazy'!

It is! But I've been hoping that something.. less crap.. would have replaced msbuild and cmake by now. Unfortunately it seems that I'm stuck with this suboptimal tooling for years to come. I'm the kind of type that prefer to either learn a tool fully or not at all, and here I'm stuck between a rock and hard place. Both those build systems were written by morons - msbuild got popular by monopoly, and cmake.. I'm not sure how something this poorly could become popular, but I guess it must have been its ability to write a cross platform CMakeLists.txt file with a msbuild/vsproj generator. It sure as hell can't have been for how the rest of cmake was designed.

[Graf Zahl]

CMake is the classic case of winning by default, because all other alternatives are even worse. I mean, many Linux devs still use autotools and create projects that cannot be compiled on Windows at all, unless a second project is provided. CMake is a definite improvement over that, and at least its scripts are versioning friendly, compare that to XCode's project files which create versioning conflicts each time two people work on it.

Yeah, I fully agree that the situation here is dismal. Fortunately MSBuild isn't something a developer needs to bother with normally, because it's hidden behind a different system.
But CMake has to be one of the most inane tools ever being developed.

How can anybody come up with such a messed up and hard to use scripting language is beyond me. But if that was all, ok, what annoys me even more is that even after so many years it still does not allow specifying system-global locations for external libraries, they have to be passed *on the command line* for that godforsaken thing to work! Ugh.

Still, compared to XCode and MSVC native project files I'd take CMake any day, despite its shortcomings and abysmally lacking documentation.

[dpJudas]

Still, compared to XCode and MSVC native project files I'd take CMake any day, despite its shortcomings and abysmally lacking documentation.

The thing that really annoys me is that I was actually doing what CMake effectively does back in the early 2000's. I had written a project generator that worked for VS 2002 and newer. Even added one for XCode later on. What it didn't have is a scripting language for setting up the parameters, but it did have a configure wizard ala cmake-gui to set up the paths and such. So personally I haven't been maintaining manual project files like that for a very long time.

I could literally in matter of days put together something I think would be better than CMake. All I have to do is take that old code, pair it with the v8 javascript engine and voila I'd already be ahead of CMakeLists.txt. My project generators would have to be updated (for XCode, I'm sure Apple changed it since last I used it) but that's less than a day's work. Now the problem is whether anyone would use it at this point? CMake is now the "best practice" solution, so if there's any early rough edges (including installing it) they'd be busy blaming my tool rather CMake - even if it would almost immediately eclipse CMake in usability and most importantly documentation (CMake is a serious joke there).

[Graf Zahl]

I think your main problem would not be lack of adoption but lack of manpower maintaining the thing. CMake is garbage and if there was something better - using JS as a scripting language would give any competing tool a major advantage by default - and that alternative could be maintained professionally, it'd eventually catch on. People mainly use CMake because it is the best available solution for the task at hand - not because it is good.

[Gez]

How can anybody come up with such a messed up and hard to use scripting language is beyond me.

Is it worse than CON scripts?

I could literally in matter of days put together something I think would be better than CMake. All I have to do is take that old code, pair it with the v8 javascript engine and voila I'd already be ahead of CMakeLists.txt. My project generators would have to be updated (for XCode, I'm sure Apple changed it since last I used it) but that's less than a day's work. Now the problem is whether anyone would use it at this point?

How about making it generate a CMakeList, so you have a project generator generator?

[Graf Zahl]

How can anybody come up with such a messed up and hard to use scripting language is beyond me.

Is it worse than CON scripts?

CON is far, far worse.

CMake is at least a language that makes sense, despite its shitty syntax. The main problem is more in how the underlying system uses it to implement its features.
CON is what happens when a low quality programmer writes a compiler. The language doesn't even have proper 'if' syntax with expressions.

[dpJudas]

How about making it generate a CMakeList, so you have a project generator generator?

You joke, but my linux version of that program actually did generate just that (in its final versions). CMake's unix building looks a lot better than the alternative autohell variants.