Make your own build system
jstimpfle.de
jstimpfle.de
Please don't do this for open source projects. Other people may want to use your code, but they generally don't want yet another build system. There are already a lot of build systems that are building very complicated projects. Surely, one of these existing, widely used build systems can be made to work for your project.
If it's about making it easy for uninitiated collaborators to add new source files, then the listed build description format is pretty self-explanatory to use. And the build script just needs to be run. It takes no arguments, so I don't think there is a problem with that.
Making an idiosyncratic system is satisfying, but the usefulness of your work is decreased if it's decorated with locally invented barriers to comprehension.
Rock on; scratch your itches.
This misses the point IMHO. In practice, whatever complex the build system is, it's generally easy to add a new source file: simply grep for an existing source file name, find the build files that refers to it, and insert a similar line for your new file.
> And the build script just needs to be run. It takes no arguments, so I don't think there is a problem with that.
What about: cross compilation? ccache injection? verbose builds? parallelism control? installation prefix? Try being a package maintainer for a GNU/Linux distribution, where all of the above needs to be kept under control. You will despise custom build systems.
Established build systems (like GNU Autoconf (e.g gcc), and, to some extent, custom Autoconf (ffmpeg, libvpx)) handle all these cases pretty well, and provide fixed commande-line options (--prefix, --host) to control them. This means the project author doesn't get to decide how the option will be named and how it will work.
This make a huge difference if you're trying to packages for your distrib dozens of projects from dozens of various authors.
With a custom build system, the best case scenario is you have to re-learn all these options for each project. The worst case scenario is: one project doesn't support some use case (e.g cross-compiling), so you have to maintain a patch that hacks into the build files to add the behavior your need.
None of those are features that developers care about. They are only of interest to package maintainers, systems administrators and other lunatics.
And I'm one of those "lunatics".
The best case scenario would be that it handles all of those scenarios in A) a highly readable way and B) has high quality documentation that demonstrates the use of all the necessary features in context.
Make's approach appears to be to use cryptic flags and settings and the best case documentation appears to be "have you tried stack overflow?". It is not the be all and end all of build systems.
Additionally, for many of the non-C++ workflows I want to accommodate, the 'make' approach appears to be hack around its deficiencies with bash scripting. Stringing together hacky bash scripts is not what I would describe as a best case scenario in any project.
I don't think of this guy's project is a meaningful competitor to make/cmake but equally, I can envisage other projects doing a better job than make on its home turf.
You already memorize similiar syntax things for other languages. Why is it so hard to accept in this case? Comparatively there are a lot less of them to remember with make as well. Stop being lazy and read the manual.
> and the best case documentation appears to be "have you tried stack overflow?".
Make's documentation is fantastic. The manual is very comprehensive and well written. Just because you're too lazy to read a manual doesn't mean there isn't documentation.
Go read the documentation for make: https://gnu.org/s/make/manual/
Yes, and cryptic configuration settings and syntax causes obscure, hard to track down bugs in other languages too. Welcome to programming. I am not saying it isn't a problem elsewhere. I'm saying that if a competing build system manages to do the same things in a less cryptic way then that's a strong point in its favor.
Essentially make is a fully fledged stringly typed programming language - it's got conditionals, loops, variables, etc. It just wasn't a fully fledged turing complete programming language that had a lot of thought put in to syntax, usability and readability. By contrast, there are many languages which actually did have a lot of thought put in to those things.
Btw, stringly typed is not commonly considered a 'good' thing.
>Stop being lazy and read the manual.
Did the fact that I commented on its quality make you think that I didn't look at it?
Try doing ctrl-F on the manual and searching for ccache and cross compilation - what the OP regarded as two of the most "necessary" features.
To be fair, I can find information about these things.... stack overflow has information on them.
Also, if you dig deep in to the docs the amount of context given is very thin. Look at section "the two flavors of variable" - it took about 300 words to explain something that could have been illustrated with two simple examples.
It is turing complete though.
Of course it's possible, GNU make is far from being perfect ; it's a pity we can't slowly evolve the language for backward compatibility reasons. Autotools also are far from being perfect.
- As a project author, I like writing custom simple makefiles and hate anything related to editing "autoconf.ac".
- As a package manager, I love projects using autoconf (or exposing autoconf's options, such as --host): they're the easiest to build because they all have the same "build interface" (alas, by default, there's no equivalent to "./configure --host" for cmake). And I despise projects using "custom simple makefiles", because it means that I'm going to have to learn yet another parochialistic BS (for build system) and have yet another special case for this specific project.
Maybe one day we will have a build system that's loved by both sides? :-)
If you write a generic makefile the uninitiated collaborator doesn't have to do anything to add new source files.
Honestly even bazel isn't built with bazel. (it can be, but they do that as a test)
It's like rolling a whole new project into your existing ones... For no clear reason.
Perhaps it's a learning experience, however there's no reason to hobble a project with it.
Thankfully, I doubt most established projects would suddenly switch to a custom build system.
Also there are plenty of auxiliary tools developed for build systems which are at best, difficult to reproduce.
If one needs to improve a build system... Try a pull request?
> there's no reason to hobble a project with it.
I think this underestimates the complexity and overhead of using and configuring some* existing build systems, and also overestimates the complexity of running (no need to edit the build config for most contributions to the project, provided the build system works well) a custom build system.
Established build systems are often complex due to being heavily generalised and configurable. I've seen projects with build configs that are longer and more complex than a custom build system for that project could be.
> there are plenty of auxiliary tools developed for build systems
This is the key comment. You can create your own custom build system while using lower level build-related libraries. There's no need to reinvent the wheel entirely.
* I said "some" existing build systems: I'm sure some are simpler than others, so this may not apply universally.
Our use case was a developer tool that would take in project files, sources, and assets, and bundle them for various platforms, push code to devices, or launch simulators for you. Notably, Shake made it fairly easy to ensure that we never needed to implement a “clean” command—all dependencies were correctly tracked.
Having strong static types and the Haskell library ecosystem available was a huge win for convenience and correctness over something like Make. Shake makes it easy to do concurrent builds with full or limited parallelism, minimise incremental build time, write multi-stage rules where e.g. you need to run the compiler to calculate the dependencies of a file, and properly handle commands that generate multiple output files. Nowadays it even supports progress reporting, profiling, and some linting of build rules.
Also for a project, a custom build system means, that you cannot hire anybody, who knows the build system, however if you are using any established build system, you can.
And also, software developers tend to forget, that they are not the only users of a build system, and usually it needs to be integrated into a build&release pipeline.
In my experience the biggest (or most annoying?) problem though is not setting up the dependencies and executing the steps along the DAG but doing the configuration part of a build: What libraries are installed on the system, giving the user ways to opt in/out of build-time features, figuring out how to build shared libraries on the target OS, how to crosscompile, there’s tons of of these that may need solving depending on your project.
ninja does a fantastic job about handling the core and leaving all the other annoying things for someone else to solve (like cmake with the ninja backend :)
The first is a bash script that ends in
$1 ${2:}
The other was a simple DAG similar to how the author describes it. Each task was a root node and subtasks were nodes connected to it. To figure out which tasks to run I'd simply scan the entire task graph for what has no subtasks and spawn a thread/process for each runnable task. Once a task finished, it's removed from the DAG. Successfully used to run database upgrade tasks (update multiple tables at once if they queries don't depend on eachother)
The only thing I ask of a custom build system is that it A) includes the classic "all" and "clean" options B) it doesn't have any dependencies beyond what I can expect from any random distro, C) autodetect libraries in common locations, not the locations on the original dev machine and D) don't require root permissions. ever. (outside "install" and maybe we can insert a rant in here how a lot of packages don't have a "uninstall" or "remove" option, making me track down the files it shat onto my disk)
As I explained my motivation was primarily keeping my build description in my own datastructures (see the text database). IMO that's a very worthwhile goal. I then went on to see what it takes to NIH everything, and it turns out that detecting what files need to be rebuilt is hairy, especially considering transitive C includes (which requires a dependency cache). But there is no one solution to these problems, and I do think there is some value in controlling that logic.
And if you get the concepts right, it can be done. I've divided the code into loosely coupled building blocks. That hopefully makes it easier to understand. It should also be possible to recombine these blocks to make different build systems.
If the project allows it, though, your dependencies can be shrunk down until there's no issue. This is far more the case with target languages that already understand modules (e.g. Rust or Python versus C or JS), or "one big framework" projects where you are relying on linking in the one framework and having it do all the heavy lifting on the build side of things.
Actually customizing a build substantially beyond that, tends to be the case more often when you have something like a compiler within your own pipeline, like automatically transforming and clipping source art assets into optimized, UI-ready form. With those systems there is a lot to be said for a simple script that you can debug.
But, as many people pointed out, having a custom build system calls for trouble (eg cross compilation, prefixes, feature control) and often produces a lot of work to maintain or cater to new needs.
Source: We roll a package based, distributed build and test system. Most build packages wrap around cmake. A core dev created it, and while he works on the build system, he can't work on the product. And if he ever decides to switch company or has a severe accident, well... (The code is mostly well written, but still the code base is huge since it was adapted to changing needs in the past decade; and while we're not tiny, we're small enough to lack the resources of having him train a second person in the guts of the system - I know probably 70% of it and am regularly lost).
If it was up to me, we'd take a look at bazel.
And there's this huge sunk-cost that makes it functionally impossible to suggest replacing with anything else. It mostly works but it's getting crustier by the day.
So I feel your pain.
Autotools has really come a long way since the bad old days back in the early 2000s. It's got some crusty corner cases, but I like it more and more as I use it.
With CMake, everything seems like it's easy to bury yourself in custom macros. And before you know it, you have a build system that's complex, hard to debug, and impossible to re-target. Scons is similar (although at least you can step through the code in Python).
I'd encourage anybody to try it out. At least, if your codebase is C or C++ and you don't need to target Windows.
What is the scope? Is this an open source project? How many people are working with it?
To me it looks like this is a personal project that only you are working on. I don't see any problem using this approach. I mean, I use a batch file as my build "system" for my personal projects. But for anything else it would be worth discussing the trade-offs versus using one of the available build systems.
I didn't understand how this works: scanCmd = 'scanincludes-%s' %(oPath). What is this scanincludes thing?
> scanCmd = 'scanincludes-%s' %(oPath)
I have each node in the DAG identified by a unique string, including command nodes. This one is a name I make up for the node that is responsible for rescanning the dependencies of a particular compilation (the compilation is identified by the .o path)
This argument and others similar to it are often repeated but I've yet to see any of those people describe what makes it awkward.
>and it is restricted to filesystem files and shell commands
It'd be pretty easy to make a makefile that depends on say a specific row on a SQL database using dummy files. Also changing the language for recipes is trivial and painfully obvious. If you can't do something as simple as `SHELL := /your/own/interpreter' then why do you think you are qualified to make a build system?
Creating dummy files is inefficient, inelegant, and unmaintainable. Changing SHELL does not solve the inconvenience of having start a new process and having to go through a command-line interface each time.
Btw. watch your language, please.
GNU Make's documentation is very well written though. Like, shockingly well. Don't be afraid to read through it if you see some weird syntax that you can't figure out.
I don't mean to insult you, so please don't take this the wrong way... The Point I want to make is this: Is it even a reasonable project to build a build system that does everything for everybody? It would appear -- from plenty of evidence around in most open-source projects -- that mostly each of them had to work around at least a couple of restrictions in their off-the-shelf build-system, and I haven't seen a reasonable sized project that got away without additional scripting.
So if the developer already has the need for custom scripting, why not take python? And if it Takes less Time+LOC to roll your own project-customized build-system than it would take you to integrate a "general-purpose" build-system... There is a very strong case for a small python script like the one presented here.
If there's a case for an existing build system here, the system in question is not make. There are much better systems out there (scons, cmake...). Just my two cents.
Master the compiler front-end’s -M option.
As a final slap to CMake, in the end it generates Makefiles, proving that Make is the be all, end all when it comes to build engines.
You better buy the book on Make and learn it and learn it well instead of wasting your time on toy tools. The longer you try to avoid it, the more time you'll waste.
I need to generate Visual Studio project files as well, but let's ignore that for now.
There is just one problem though, your page isn't loading.
Listen, I'm not fighting ego fights here. Your borderline personal attacks (one of which was apparently removed, either by you or a moderator) are not appreciated. And I'm not a clueless idiot. If you still want to discuss something for good, please write me an email. It does not need to go here. You can also easily find the repository with a web search, if you decide to bother with it.
Bitch please. You're the one who started with those.
Again, your behaviour is extremely disrespectful. Please reconsider the way you treat people here.
You never specified what about it is inappropriate. Your complaints about the language amounted at most to a pathetic ad hominem.
>As a result you replied in a way that missed any understanding and respect
There was nothing to understand as you had not communicated anything but the fact you found it somehow offensive. As the comment contains nothing offensive you need to be more specific. Since you didn't do that it comes of just as a dismissive personal attack.
>and harshly critized me for writing in an unintelligible way
This is because the sentence was unintelligible even when I'd asked multiple people to try to interpret it. This is not harsh criticism, it's just a statement of a fact.
>(I accidentally left out one word in a sentence, sorry for that)
The lack of that word made the sentence completely nonsensical. Why are you whining to me about not understanding it? And it seems you never fixed the sentence so it's still just as unintelligible.
>Changing SHELL does not solve the inconvenience of having start a new process and having to go through a command-line interface each time.
What does this mean?
> Since you didn't do that it comes of just as a dismissive personal attack.
I think (from the earlier comment):
> Also changing the language for recipes is trivial and painfully obvious. If you can't do something as simple as `SHELL := /your/own/interpreter' then why do you think you are qualified to make a build system?
is quite an obvious personal attack, and it got deservedly flagged multiple times. I'm sure you're able to find this yourself from two little paragraphs. No need to act as if you couldn't. And even if you couldn't, no need to be extremely offensive and start name-calling.
> This is because the sentence was unintelligible even when I'd asked multiple people to try to interpret it. This is not harsh criticism, it's just a statement of a fact.
Of course it was harsh criticism for an oversight that just happens. The comment is no longer there, but you chose a completely inappropriate and aggressive tone.
> What does this mean?
Replace "having start" with "having to start". And maybe replace "solve" with "remove", which might be a better fit here (I'm not a native speaker).
The latter half of the sentence is still incomprehensible.
This can be impractical and error-prone, especially if you add shell AND make syntax on top. From within a decent scripting language (e.g. Python) instead, you can simply use the convenient built-in data structures (e.g. list/tuple of str) as command-line parameters for subprocesses.
Do you mean to the shell's command-line parameters or the compiler's? Either way whatever state you need you can also give as macro expansions.
MACRO := whatever
SHELL := /usr/bin/python
.RECIPEPREFIX := >
.ONESHELL:
.PHONY: all
.SILENT:
all:
>foo="$(MACRO)"
>print("{}".format(foo))
>print("You can call yur compiler from python if you want. You could even write the build system from OP here if you wanted to")
Make syntax is just simple macro expansion. Shouldn't be too hard. And no one is forcing you to use a bourne-style shell. You can use Lua, Perl, Python, Javascript, whatever you want.
>From within a decent scripting language (e.g. Python) instead
You can use Python.
>you can simply use the convenient built-in data structures (e.g. list/tuple of str) as command-line parameters for subprocesses.
Then do that here. You don't need to reinvent everything just because you dislike one part of an existing solution. This kind of NIH is why there are so many sub par solutions for everything and nothing is compatible with each other.
The point of my post was to show that there isn't much to the fundamentals of Make. And to encourage finding out what is needed and how the weaknesses of Make can be avoided. Most people here seem to agree that the more advanced features of Make (i.e., what goes beyond POSIX Make) should not be used. Make is good for simple uses, since it's good at this: timestamp and DAG based process spawning. For advanced/specialized usage, it's terrible, much like it's the case with sh. I don't want to use it (at least not directly) for larger systems. See, I'm not a proponent of complexity and feature-laden systems at all. I despise C++, for example. But Make's syntax simply does not scale to larger systems. It does not offer solid enough abstractions to build your way up. Just like sh, which does not even have a usable list structure (there is only one list per function call).
If what it does is enough for you, that's fine with me.
It's not that I am unable to read the GNU Make docs (I have considered them more than once). Make just isn't good for more serious programming, as the proliferation of systems built on top (autoconf, CMake, ...) suggests. History has shown that macros do not scale. To my knowledge the only "macro languages" in widespread use for non-trivial things today are m4 and Tex, and frankly both are a pain to write things in. (While they do have their strengths if used expertly, for simple things). And while that is the case, Make is even less structured than those.
Also there is no point in maintaining a plain Makefile if you are on other systems where Make isn't a first class citizen. I also need to generate Visual Studio files, for example.
Also, you can set SHELL to another scripting language, but that defeats much of the point of using make in the first place. And again, you still need to spawn processes and transfer state through a fragile text interface. And most languages' syntaxes integrate even worse with Make's than sh does. How do I insert commas between words to generate python lists would be my first question, and frankly I do not want to know the answer.
> This kind of NIH is why there are so many sub par solutions for everything and nothing is compatible with each other.
It's not true that it's impossible to design a system that was better than Make. But before a system can be evaluated, one must decide what the system should be good at in the first place. I want a system with decidedly different strengths than Make. Having one syntax that sucks but is built-in and available everywhere is not a goal for me.
And the "compatibility" argument is just not there, sorry. Yes, I require python, but that's it. I wrote a simple script that just runs and build. Nothing wrong with that.
It works perfectly fine with things other than space.
>and it has a host of cryptic functions with difficult to understand semantics
This is why the GNU Make has a fantastic manual, I suggest you check it out: https://gnu.org/s/make/manual
>That it's what is installed on most Unix-style computers isn't an argument against trying to make different/better systems.
You aren't making a better system though. You're making a worse, less flexible, less understood, system that no one can hire person to work for and that won't be useful at any workplace. If you really wanted to improve over make you'd be making a general purpose tool that isn't targeting any specific project or language.
Alas, this has jack shit to do with the comment you're replying to. Let's deal with the issues we've been talking about before shifting the goalpost.
>Also, you can set SHELL to another scripting language, but that defeats much of the point of using make in the first place.
It still gives you a standard interface that packagers and users would expect for build software and you don't have to rewrite your DAG every time by hand.
>And again, you still need to spawn processes and transfer state through a fragile text interface.
You break the task into multiple parts so you hopefully don't have to run it all every time. Text files aren't really any more fragile than any other way to tranfer the state, just write a json or whatever format you like.
>And most languages' syntaxes integrate even worse with Make's than sh does.
What integration do you want that you had in your silly hand written one?
>How do I insert commas between words to generate python lists would be my first question, and frankly I do not want to know the answer.
You can either construct a macro to do this or you can just give the data space delimited to python and change the spaces to commas there. Surely you know how to do it with python so why are you insisting on doing it with make?
>It's not true that it's impossible to design a system that was better than Make.
Of course it's possible. Too bad no one has actually attempted it.
>And the "compatibility" argument is just not there, sorry. Yes, I require python, but that's it. I wrote a simple script that just runs and build. Nothing wrong with that.
You also require your own library. Most people probably don't have this installed. Also if you wrote this at a company and left then they'd have a half-baked build system and they cannot hire anyone that's familiar with it.
Cool, sounds like a really robust idea. Let's try some dollars or semicolons, then. I'm sure the next shell will be happy. (I don't even think that this is Make's biggest weakness. I can usually get along with that, as long as I get to choose the filenames and don't need any fancy strings otherwise. It's just a testament to what a poor programming model macros are).
> Text files aren't really any more fragile than any other way to tranfer the state
It's not about plain text files for transferring "state" (e.g. a list of fixed strings), which work fine for many cases and do have considerable advantages. This is about combining a cryptic shell language with a lousy build system macro syntax and semantics.
> This is why the GNU Make has a fantastic manual, I suggest you check it out: https://gnu.org/s/make/manual
As I wrote many times, I do actually know Make and have read much of the manual. Can't you believe me?
> It still gives you a standard interface that packagers and users would expect for build software
Believe me, packagers are indeed able to run a python script as opposed to only a make script. (Yes, if my intent was to have a software packaged by independent maintainers, I should add a "clean" routine as well. And offer some knobs for compiler flags - but this is already veering into fragile land, since the developer can't know what unexpected compiler options package maintainers will come up with).
> What integration do you want that you had in your silly hand written one?
Now I can't parse this sentence, but I sense that it's not a polite one.
> You can either construct a macro to do this or you can just give the data space delimited to python and change the spaces to commas there.
Oh, come on. I do not want to put in so much work (it's not a one-time thing - you have to do that every time you transfer a list) for such a poor, fragile result.
> Surely you know how to do it with python so why are you insisting on doing it with make?
I do not want to mess with Make at all. This should not be news.
> You also require your own library.
You can easily replace that with csv or json (both will be more robust than Make), or just put the data as literals into the python script, as I stated. My script is not intended as a finished thing for other people to use. This should not be news, either.
Get over the shell part. You don't have to use Unix shells.
>As I wrote many times, I do actually know Make and have read much of the manual. Can't you believe me?
If you think the macro names are somhow cryptic, no I can't believe you. There are only a few of them to remember.
>Now I can't parse this sentence, but I sense that it's not a polite one.
You were complaining that languages other than sh integrate with Make worse than sh does. What integration do you need. The integration with sh is pretty much limited to some predefined macros such as $(CP) and $(RM).
>Oh, come on. I do not want to put in so much work (it's not a one-time thing - you have to do that every time you transfer a list) for such a poor, fragile result.
Then define a function to do it. Surely you know how to do that as a mighty python programmer, right?
>I do not want to mess with Make at all. This should not be news.
Your complaints about make make it seem like you think that when using make you have to do everything with it and shell. If you don't want to mess with make then mess with python.
I HAVE HEARD YOU. You've said that countless times. It doesn't change anything. There's the fundamental problem that the shell statement is a single string. You combine strings with Make to form a single string (it's a form of templating, recognizing some custom sequences), and then rely on a shell on the other end to parse it to the correct list/structure of tokens. The same fragile approach has lead to many, many SQL injection vulnerabilities (or simply fragilities) in the past. It's fundamentally not a solid approach. And there is no way to fix that.
There's a reason I haven't seen a usage of a Makefile using a different shell than sh in the wild. sh is the one language whose super minimal syntax plays best with that cheap sort of templating. It works typically, but it's a fragile construction that is relying on suitable inputs.
> If you think the macro names are somhow cryptic, no I can't believe you. There are only a few of them to remember.
It's not about the few named built-in functions. It's about the weird macro expansion model that does not even have a solid list data structure, and about the many cryptic non-identifier shorthands. And about the total lack of the slightest support for creating solid building blocks. A list structure and a way to define functions and I would be almost happy. But it's not there, and I'm not going to mess with this: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html#Call-Func... . And it's not even portable.
> The integration
By integration I meant the interplay that you get by overlaying two syntaxes (that of the shell, whatever it may be, and that of Make splicing things in). Mixing syntaxes has been a bad idea in the past, and always will be.
> Then define a function to do it. Surely you know how to do that as a mighty python programmer, right?
So I'm supposed to define the function with each invocation? Or define a special shell that pre-defines the function? And even then each line will look something like
do_your_thing_with(splitfiles("""$(MYMAKEMACRO)"""))
> Your complaints about make make it seem like you think that when using make you have to do everything with it and shell. If you don't want to mess with make then mess with python.
No, for the last time. I get what you say (I'm not dumb) and I don't think it's a good idea. At all. If you want to continue tinkering with macros, let's simply agree to disagree. Ok?
Geez if only programming language designers had come up with a way to bring code from other files. They could call it "include" or something like that. But that's just some crazy talk of course.
It's a general purpose DAG runner. It's not really feasible to add parsing for all the different possible languages that one might want to use imports in. Luckily at least GCC and Clang both have the option -MMD and any sane compiler for other languages should have something similiar.
Using a saner tool than plain make for C/C++ is worth it every time in my book.
make can still be very useful for other stuff, though.
Honestly though, raw GNU Make isn't too bad either, except for the not having any good built-in mechanisms for a 'configuration' step.
Make can be used for automation of many different tasks, for example web page rendering or database creation, to name a few. And, it has built in rules for handling header files correctly; you would do well to study and understand them.
Having the full power of Python really is something else. So I was considering generating simple repetitive Make rules. But I wanted to explore what it takes to do the rest myself, as well. Setting up dependencies for Make is not nice, either. Having the code under control means being able to adapt to any requirement. It would be easy for example to convert this into a build server kind of thing.
Having a 10s delay is not acceptable to me. I didn't experience that myself though.
There is no simple repetitive make rules in the build system of the project I am on: all the rules are generated using macros. gnumake is a full scripting language that is dedicated to timestamp dependencies. It can manipulate easily lists of string (as long as they do not contain spaces). What are the advanced things that requires a better language ?
There is something awfully wrong if processing 5000 files and cached dependendencies takes 10s. It should take a few ms at most, even if written in a scripting language like Python. I would not be surprised if this is because that build system heavily misuses GNU Make's variable substitution features, instead of being written in a language that features proper data structures (e.g. set, map)