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Comment by flanfly | Hacker News Reader

I really like the idea of SCons. Writing Python is strictly better than using the CMake language or m4. But, quoting one of my colleges: "SCons spends 5min to figure out nothing needs to be done."

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I have exactly the opposite experience: I do not want to write a program to compile my program.

Having used both scons and waf, and also having used make, cmake and cargo, I would take any of the last three over scons or waf in a heartbeat. I think cargo is far and away the nicest to use because there is very little to actually do to build your program. Using waf or scons was always an exercise of 'I added a header file, so now I need to figure out the scons/waf API in order to tell it what to do with it'.

I was an early adopter of CMake (although nowadays I mostly either use plain Makefiles or use languages that have a reasonable build-system integrated) and while at the time it did feel much more approachable than the autotools I remember being baffled by how utterly terrible the syntax was. It's ugly, noisy, redundant, quirky and didn't share any obvious similarity with an existing mainstream language. I wonder how much that cost them in terms of adoption.

At least autotools and m4 have the excuse of all that historical baggage and very broad portability.

Waf (https://waf.io) provides a Pythonic way of much more quickly doing nothing.

I would recommend you to not program your builds with the scons framework (not even normal python). See my larger comment. The problem is that you are one step away of creating a giant mess of unnecessary, ununderstandable mess from which you will never escape. Use less power for the parts of the system which are not your core value.

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