perl-App-AutoBuild

Perl Tool to Make It Quick and Easy to Compile a C/C++ Project with Auto[cut]

After writing a makefile for my 30th C project, I decided this was dumb and it (the computer) should figure out which object files should be linked in or recompiled. The idea behind this module is you create a build.pl that uses App::AutoBuild and calls build() with cflags and ldflags, an output binary filename, and a C file to start with (usually the C file with main()). App::AutoBuild will figure out all the object files your C file depends on. A list of included header files (.h) will be computed by GCC and remembered in a cache. At build time, stat() is called on each header file included by your .c file. If any have a different mtime, the .c file will be recompiled. If you include a .h file that has a corresponding .c file, this process repeats and the output object code will be linked into your final binary automatically. This tool isn't supposed to be a make replacement-- there are plenty of those, and at least one great one already in Perl. The idea is that the build system should know enough about the source code to do what you want for you. This replaces all the functionality of a makefile for a standard C project with the added bonus of having it only link in the objects that are actually used in each output target.