powermake 1.1.1.post1

Yet another makefile tool. This one is meant to be super fast, super easy and crossplatform while leaving full power to the user at any time.

PowerMake

• PowerMake
  • What is PowerMake ?
  • For which project is PowerMake suitable ?
  • Advantages of PowerMake
  • Disadvantages of PowerMake
  • Philosophy
  • Installation
  • Quick Example
  • Documentation
    • Command line arguments
    • powermake.run

What is PowerMake ?

Powermake is an utility to compile C/C++ code, just like Make, Ninja, cmake or xmake.

His goal is to give full power to the user, while being cross-platform, easier to use than Make and faster than Ninja.

For which project is PowerMake suitable ?

PowerMake was specifically designed for complex projects that have very complicated compilation steps, with a lot of pre-built tasks and which need to be compiled on multiple operating systems with different options.

Advantages of PowerMake

• Extremely fast:

  • PowerMake is approximately 2x faster than Ninja, at least on relatively small projects
    • With a project that has 10 000 lines of C:
      • Ninja takes 1.484 seconds
      • PowerMake takes 0.649 seconds

• Cross-Platform:

  • PowerMake is able to detect the compiler installed on your machine and give you an abstraction of the compiler syntax.
    • This currently works well with GCC/G++/Clang/Clang++/MSVC, but other compilers will be add.
  • Because it's written in python it works in almost all machine and you can always write the compilation instructions for your machine and for your compiler.

• Gives you complete control of what you are doing. Nothing is hidden and any behavior can be overwritten.

Disadvantages of PowerMake

• PowerMake is very young so it changes a lot at each version and you may have to write some features by yourself (the whole point of PowerMake is that you can write missing features).

• Because PowerMake gives you full control, the tool can't really know what's you are doing during the compilation step. For example, if we want to import dependencies from another PowerMake, the only thing we can do for you is running the PowerMake where it stands and scanning his output directory. This works well but has some limitations...

Philosophy

All other Make-like utilities that I know parse a file to understand directives from it.

PowerMake does the opposite. You write a python script, you do whatever you like in this script and you call PowerMake functions to help you compiling your code.
This gives you a complete control; you can retrieve files from the web, read an write files, even train a Neural Network if you want and at any time you can use Powermake functions to help you in your compilation journey.

Installation

pip install -U powermake

Quick Example

This example compile all .c and .cpp files that are recursively in the same folder as the python script and generate an executable named program_test

Warning ! PowerMake calculate all paths from his own location, not the location where it is run.
For example, python ./folder/makefile.py will do the same as cd ./folder && python ./makefile.py

import powermake


def on_build(config: powermake.Config):

    files = powermake.get_files("**/*.c", "**/*.cpp")

    objects = powermake.compile_files(config, files)

    print(powermake.link_files(config, objects))


powermake.run("program_test", build_callback=on_build)

Documentation

Command line arguments

To benefit from the command line parser, you have to use the powermake.run function.

If no arguments are passed trough the command line, the default behavior is to trigger the build callback.
You can also write python makefile.py build, python makefile.py clean or python makefile.py install [install_location] to trigger one of the three different callbacks.

Alternatively, you can also use the option -b or --build, -c or --clean and -i or --install.
This alternative has a great advantages: you can combine multiple tasks. For example, running python makefile.py -bci will first trigger the clean callback, then the build callback and finally the install callback. (The order will always be clean -> build -> install).

You can also replace the -b argument with -r (using -br does the same as -r) and this will force the makefile to recompile everything, without trying to figure out which file needs to be recompiled.

There is many more options you can add such as -d (--debug), -q (--quiet), -v (--verbose), etc...

All these options can be listed by running python makefile.py -h (or python makefile.py --help)

/!\ Specificity: While python makefile.py install and python makefile.py --install takes the install_location has an optional argument, this argument has been disabled with the -i option, because writing -bic would have trigger the install callback with the location c

powermake.run

powermake.run(target_name: str, *, build_callback: callable, clean_callback: callable = default_on_clean, install_callback: callable = default_on_install)

It's the entry point of most programs.
This function parse the command line and generate a powermake.Config object, containing all the information required for the compilation, from the compiler path to the level of verbosity to use.

Then, depending on the command line arguments, this function will call the clean callback, the build callback, the install callback or all of them.

The target_name is a string that will be stored in the config and which will be used for auto-naming. You should set this to the name of your executable or the name of your library.

The build_callback and the clean_callback only takes 1 argument: The powermake.Config object generated.

Example:

import powermake


def on_build(config: powermake.Config):
    print("The build callback was called !")
    print(f"Compiling the project {config.target_name}...")

def on_clean(config: powermake.Config):
    print("The clean callback was called !")
    print(f"Erasing the project {config.target_name}...")


powermake.run("my_project", build_callback=on_build, clean_callback=on_clean)

The install_callback takes 2 arguments: The powermake.Config object and a string location that can be None if the user hasn't specified anything on the command line.

NOTE: It's often a very good idea to use the install_callback has a "pre-install script" and then call powermake.default_on_install.

Example:

import powermake


def on_build(config: powermake.Config):
    print("The build callback was called !")
    print(f"Compiling the lib {config.target_name}...")

def on_install(config: powermake.Config, location: str):
    if location is None:
        # No location is explicitly provided so we change the default for our convenance.
        location = "/usr/local/"
    
    # This ensure that the file "my_lib.h" will be exported into /usr/local/include/my_lib/my_lib.h
    # The .so or .a that corresponds will be copied into /usr/local/lib/my_lib.so
    config.add_exported_headers("my_lib.h", subfolder="my_lib")

    powermake.default_on_install(config, location)


powermake.run("my_lib", build_callback=on_build, clean_callback=on_clean)

documentation in progress...