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Zack Build

Cross Buildsystem Integration

Integrating/Nesting Build Systems is tricky — especially if the build systems in question have a rather narrow view on how build steps should be performed.

Here are some resources on integration patterns and concrete implementations.

Ninja Integration

The ninja build system is an attractive integration target:

  1. It is rather simple because it aims to be a generation target for other build systems, and therefore does not have to be user-friendly.
  2. Build systems like CMake, Meson use it as an execution target, so integrating with Ninja also allows integrating with these systems.

Resources

nix-ninja:

Parses ninja.build files and generates a derivation per compilation unit.

It is written in rust and contains a ninja-parser!

rules_rust provides Bazel rules for rust/cargo and works really well. Rust would be an obvious early choice to support in Zack to allow self-building.

crate2nix generates nix files to compile rust/cargo programs.