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Programming IT Technology

Bram Moolenaar (of VIM fame) On A-A-P 18

Posted by timothy from the makes-your-head-spin dept.
blab writes "I've posted an interview with Bram Moolenaar, of Vim fame, about his very newly released project A-A-P. Find out about 'super-make.'"
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Bram Moolenaar (of VIM fame) On A-A-P More

Bram Moolenaar (of VIM fame) On A-A-P

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  • Yay! (Score:1)

    by ivan256 ( 17499 )
    Oh joy! He combined the syntax of makefiles with python! It's going to be so much fun to use! I can't wait!

    (</sarcasm>)
  • For you none dutch speaking barbarians :-)
  • Eventually, when you start building a lot of software, you write something like this. I've seen several in-house build systems that looked like this. It'll be nice to have something standard.

    I'm impressed that it's cross-platform, too.

    • Re:Okay, this is pretty damned cool (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Java folks call it Ant.
      • After reading the article and (briefly) looking at the website, I'd have to agree. But, it is different than Ant in that it is an application compiled for the native platform it's running on.

        So now there's an Ant alternative in the works. Coming from Bram, it'll be a good one.
      • From the interview:
        The second kind of solution takes a more drastic route. This includes using XML, Python or another language for the build script. These all look very complicated, it is a puzzle to figure out what a build script is actually doing.
        Sounds to me like he was dissatisfied with ant. Though I don't know what the Python reference is doing in there. So maybe he was extremely confused about Ant. "Python can't run this. Huh." :P

        • Ant is terrible (Score:3, Interesting)

          by GusherJizmac ( 80976 )
          Ant is a weak scripting language, with a retarded syntax, and no useful looping or conditional ability. It is the poorest build system I've ever seen, outside of "build.bat". I'm really excited for AAP, and hope it takes off and becomes usable. I personally never had a problem with make, but it's not cross-platform (because it depends on the various UNIX utilities), and ant is just so pathetically bad, and shows no signs of improving.

          • Re:Ant is terrible (Score:4, Informative)

            by cjpez ( 148000 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @04:02PM (#4567854) Homepage Journal
            At the company I used to work for, we started using Ant for the build system for a number of our projects, and it ended up working out really well. It'd do all the automatic downloading of files and dependencies, etc. We could use it to build up a development environment in no time at all (just install Java/Ant and then run one command to have everything automatically do cvs checkouts, compile, and all that good stuff). It also made installations a breeze - we cut back on our software install time by a phenomenal amount, because all we needed to do was run one or two commands.

            Not that you couldn't do all that stuff in some other way, but it did work out really well for us. The XML-ish syntax was a little hokey, but we had defined so many targets for ourselves that it made life really easy.

          • Ant is not a scripting language at all, as isn't make. It's about processing rules, setting parameters etc., all in a simple logical fashion.
            BTW, the last time I checked, there were conditional constructs in Ant.
            If one needs advanced processing in Ant, they write additional "tasks" for it in Java. It works like a charm, and doesn't need yet another scripting language. The build file format is XML-based, which means it can be generated or transformed using a bunch of well-known tools and scripting languages.

    • Oh? (Score:4, Funny)

      by cjpez ( 148000 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @03:29PM (#4567470) Homepage Journal
      I'm impressed that it's cross-platform, too.
      From the aap website [a-a-p.org]:
      Limitations
      A-A-P is still under development, not everything works yet!
      • Only Unix is currently supported.
      • I think the idea is that A-A-P can be used on any UNIX-ish system to build a program---he refers to a Makefile template system (sounds like he means autoconf/configure), and how it has limitations and requires learning all this extra stuff...
        • Hm, I suppose when I hear "cross-platform" I think UNIX/Win/Mac/etc. Interoperability between various UNIX systems isn't nearly as impressive since they're already so interchangeable on a number of levels. Ah, well.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Cook? (Score:2, Informative)

    by DannyBoy ( 12682 )
    What about cook? I've been using it at work for about a year now, and have been very happy with it. It is a new syntax to learn, but the concepts are the same as make. I'd say its as good or better than ant (and I disagree with the comment "ant is terrible". its been great on all of the java-based projects i've worked on in the past couple of years). I'd guess that cook had at least some influence on aap as well. In the interview, Bram specifically used the word "recipe", which is the same terminoligy used by cook. I'd highly reccomend it to anyone looking for a better make. http://www.canb.auug.org.au/~millerp/cook/cook.htm l [auug.org.au]

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