Also, as far as I know, currently (meta)build systems implement support for
various tooling since those tools can't understand their format. If we
would have a standardized one, those tools could directly read (or ask a
middleware tool to do it) and do their job better. This would encourage
more and better tooling that works out of the box

On Mon, Nov 25, 2024 at 5:03 PM Boris Kolpackov via SG15 <
sg15_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> James via SG15 <sg15_at_[hidden]> writes:
>
> > Has there been any consideration for establishing a standardized format
> to
> > describe C++ projects that could be universally recognized by different
> > build systems? This wouldn’t involve creating a new build system, but
> > rather defining a common file format that accurately describes project
> > structure, dependencies, and build requirements in a standardized way.
> >
> > The goal would be to improve interoperability and developer experience
> > across different build systems and generators, also allowing projects to
> > seamlessly transition between them without modifications to the project
> > file itself.
>
> C++ projects vary greatly in terms of build complexity.
>
> On one extreme you would have a novice playing with their first
> C++ program. They don't care about things like being cross-platform
> and they would prefer to not even write anything build system-related
> relying on some sort of build by convention or whatever their IDE
> might generate under the hood.
>
> On the other extreme you would have something like Qt, which (just
> to highlight) cares greatly about being cross-platform, relies on
> autoconf-style configuration probing, needs to compile Objective-C/C++
> besides C/C++, relies heavily on source code generators (moc, etc),
> and so on.
>
> I am interested to hear, what part of this range you think this
> standardized file format should cater to?
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