ceasium 0.2.0

A hassle free C (gcc) JSON build system.

Ceasium

A hassle free JSON based C (gcc) build system.

I have developed this on 2023-10-15 by myself. I have only minimally used it myself. It most likely still does not support some critical features for serious C development

Introduction

I like programming in C, but I hate Makefiles and CMake. It takes an effort to learn and they do not have an intuitive syntax so I keep having to look up how to use them. In addition to this, they are quite time consuming to setup. I do admit, they are extremely configurable and portable. However, rarely do I need anything complicated. So I created Ceasium, which is very simple C gcc build system.

It works by creating gcc commands and running them in console. It uses pkg-config to add the correct flags for libraries you list in the build file.

Installation

pip install ceasium

Prerequisites

• Python
• GCC compiler
• pkg-config (usually installed by default on all Linux distros, incase of Windows MSYS2 should have it for MACs brew install pkg-config).

Usage

Ceasium provides these commands:

ceasium init // Creates an empty c project
ceasium install // installs libraries defined in build.json
ceasium build // Builds .exe (default), .a or .dll based on configuration
ceasium run // Runs the built exe file
ceasium clean // Removes entire build directory

Arguments

All commands:

--path=<project-root-path>

Path to project root.

Configuration

Example config:

{
  "name": "myapp",
  "type": "exe",
  "libraries": ["opengl32", "glew32", "glfw3", "SDL2"],
  "package-manager": "pacman",
  "WarningsAsErrors": false,
  "OptimizationLevel": 3,
  "packages": {
    "pacman": [
      "pacman -S --needed --noconfirm mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-glew",
      "pacman -S --needed --noconfirm mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-SDL2",
      "pacman -S --needed --noconfirm mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-glfw"
    ],
    "apt": [
      "sudo apt-get install -y libglew-dev",
      "sudo apt-get install -y libglfw3",
      "sudo apt-get install -y libglfw3-dev",
      "sudo apt-get install -y libglfw3"
    ]
  }
}

Future Improvements

Thinking about what could ceasium use to be better a few things come to mind:

• Support for different compilers
• Support for more flags
• Parallel compilation (personally all of the projects I work on are small so speed is never an issue)
• Package management. Adding pacman, apt lines might get tedious. Something like ceasium install glew32 would be nice. For this an index would need to be maintained which maps the name glew32 to a valid apt or pacman package.
• Time for usage. I will be frank here - I have developed this on 2023-10-15, this needs to get more usage before I can know what is bad what is good and what needs to change.

Support

This is a small system, took about half a day to develop and about another half a day to publish it. I might put more effort into it, so it becomes better with time. If you end up liking it and want to support a solo developer - here's a link for that.