Re: the ideal Visual Studio build system

For building we use SCons:

http://www.scons.org/

Using SCons allows us to insert many custom complex build steps (with
dependencies, having builds for many platforms compiling at the same
time), and compile fine under OSX, Windows (MSVC and Mingw), Unixes,
IPhone, Wii and PSP.

For code editing (C++ Mainly) We use Qt-Creator:

http://qt.nokia.com/products/developer-tools

Even though it may seem that it was designed by Nokia for developing
Qt, we have found that Qt-Creator has more features, customizability,
stability  and flexibility for editing and browsing C++ than Visual
Studio, or even netbeans, even if not used for Qt development. It
truly is a surprising solid and feature rich IDE for C++. Build steps
can be easily customized and we have it integrated to SCons fine.


Cheers

Juan Linietsky






On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 2:14 PM, Brandon Van Every <[email protected]> wrote:
> I am revisiting old pet peeves.  It all started when I checked out
> VS2010 Beta2 and saw that C++ is now MSBuild driven.  I have buckets
> of CMake, GNU Make, and Autoconf experience, including an attempt to
> build a translator between the two.  I'm not keen on CMake anymore,
> and I'm leery of learning curves that don't prove to be profitable in
> the long term.  So, I've been evaluating whether to go up a MSBuild
> learning curve merely to scratch an itch.
>
> What would be the ideal Visual Studio build system?
>
> The target user I'm imagining, is someone who does a lot of C++,
> DirectX, and Lua development.  The user may want to port commercial
> apps from Windows to some other platform, but Windows and Visual
> Studio are their home development platform, and the 1st platform
> they're developing for.  That is, if their title makes enough money on
> Windows, they will consider porting it to something else, but they
> aren't worried about "up front" cross-platform support.  First the
> title has to make money.  If your notion of a target user is very
> different from mine, please describe.
>
> I have found that the VS IDE is fine for trivial projects, but the
> minute you want to customize your directory layout, it becomes a PITA.
>  Like having to add lots of /Idir just because the IDE wants
> everything in a subdirectory.  I now understand why some people curse
> and swear at IDEs.  This drives me towards customizing the IDE with
> some kind of wizard, so that I can have my cake and eat it too.
> However, it is irritating to think I'm being driven towards a
> Microsoft-specific solution, especially when I know the IDE is going
> to churn in the next rev.
>
> MSBuild is an XML thing.  Coming from a CMake background, it looks
> "scripting impoverished."  CMake has a full, if clunky, scripting
> language.  Adding Lua support was debated ~2 years ago, but for legacy
> support reasons, it didn't happen and I doubt it ever will happen.
> Back then I also researched a lot of other build systems and found
> similar "script impoverishment" in other XML technologies such as Ant.
>  Some people were trying to use Ruby to address that.  I thought Lua
> was a far more logical choice for game developers.
>
> Dumping VS, writing or extending a Lua-based build system, and
> integrating it with SciTE http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html is an
> option I have considered.  Lua is the extension language of SciTE.
> The main thing that holds me back, is I doubt the debugging experience
> would be any fun.  I could be wrong though; I haven't really looked
> into it yet.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Brandon Van Every
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> [email protected]
> http://lists.midnightryder.com/listinfo.cgi/sweng-gamedev-midnightryder.com
>
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