I'm working on "Cargo but for C".
It started out as something marginally more useful than vendoring your dependencies as submodules + baking in the knowledge of how to build a bunch of common projects.
I realized, though, that there was somehow a huge gap in the insane world of C build tools. There's nothing that:
- Lets you pin really precisely and builds everything from source (i.e. no binary repository)
- Does not depend on either a scripting language or a completely insane DSL (Conan uses Python, CMake is an eldritch horror, ditto Make, lots of other tools of course but none of them quite hit the mark)
- Has a good balance of "builds are data" and "builds are code".
Anyway, it's going great. There are, of course, a ton of problems to solve. Chief among them is the obvious caveat that C is not a monoculture like Rust. There will be zero upstream libraries that use this tool natively. But I don't think it matters. I think I can build something which is as much better to the existing tools as, say, UV was to existing Python tools, even with that disadvantage.
It started out as something marginally more useful than vendoring your dependencies as submodules + baking in the knowledge of how to build a bunch of common projects.
I realized, though, that there was somehow a huge gap in the insane world of C build tools. There's nothing that:
- Lets you pin really precisely and builds everything from source (i.e. no binary repository)
- Does not depend on either a scripting language or a completely insane DSL (Conan uses Python, CMake is an eldritch horror, ditto Make, lots of other tools of course but none of them quite hit the mark)
- Has a good balance of "builds are data" and "builds are code".
Anyway, it's going great. There are, of course, a ton of problems to solve. Chief among them is the obvious caveat that C is not a monoculture like Rust. There will be zero upstream libraries that use this tool natively. But I don't think it matters. I think I can build something which is as much better to the existing tools as, say, UV was to existing Python tools, even with that disadvantage.