Show HN: Xmake, a modern C/C++ build utility
What I miss about these tools is some &quot;relatively&quot; straightforward dependency detection and generation.<p>That is, I have a bunch of .cpp files which need to be compiled into individual executables in a folder bin&#x2F;. I also have a folder inc&#x2F; which contains some headers (.h) and those headers possibly also have some associated TU (.cpp).<p>Now g++ can already generate a dependency graph of headers for an executable. It is then (with a standard Makefile and some supporting bash scripts) quite straightforward to mangle that graph into a list of translation units (namely those files whose name matches a depended-on header) which must be compiled and linked into the executable.<p>That is, I can simply create a new &quot;executable file&quot; .cpp file in bin&#x2F;, include some headers therein and when I say make, the Makefile automagically figures out which (internal) dependencies it needs to link in when linking the executable.<p>Now that I have these &quot;relatively straightforward&quot; scripts and the corresponding Makefile, the incentive to move to another (nicer) build system which would require me to rebuild this infrastructure to fit into this other build system&#x27;s view of the world is quite low – unless there is some way to do this directly?<p>Xmake as shown here (and also Meson linked in a sister comment) appear to still require manual selection of dependencies.