Awesome
Lake - a Lua-based Build Tool
lake
is a build engine written in Lua, similar to Ruby's rake.
It is not a makefile generator, but evaluates dependencies directly - that is, it is an
interpreter of dependency rules, not a makefile compiler. This is a sensible design decision
because lake
is small (about 70K pure Lua, 250K together with Lua and LuaFileSystem) enough
to carry around.
Much of the inspiration for lake
comes from Martin Fowler's article on dependency-driven
programming in rake
.
There is one file, lake
, which only depends on LuaFileSystem. On Unix, you can
simply make it executable and put it on your path.
Or for Windows:
rem lake.bat
lua \path\to\lake %*
Apart from being quick & compact, these are the features of interest:
- it is an embedded DSL (Domain Specific Language) - all the normal functionality of Lua is available
- it knows about both
GCC
and Microsoft Visual C++ compilers, and does cross-platform builds - it knows about building Lua extensions in C or C++
For example, a lakefile for building a GTK application can be as simple as:
c.program{'hello',needs='gtk'}
Creating a binary Lua extension:
c.shared{'mylib',needs='lua'}
lake
can be used to automate other tools as well. This will convert all JPEG files in the
current directory to PNG, but only if the PNG file does not exist or the JPEG file has changed.
to_png = rule('.jpg','.png',
'convert $(INPUT) $(TARGET)'
)
default(to_png '*')
Here is a lakefile for building Lua itself:
LUA='lua'
LUAC='luac print'
as_dll = WINDOWS
if as_dll then
defs = 'LUA_BUILD_AS_DLL'
end
if not WINDOWS then
defs = 'LUA_USE_LINUX'
end
-- build the static library
lib,ll=c.library{'lua',src='*',exclude={LUA,LUAC},defines=defs}
-- build the shared library
if as_dll then
libl = c.shared{'lua',rules=ll,dynamic=true}
else
libl = lib
end
-- build the executables
lua = c.program{'lua',libl,src=LUA,needs='dl math readline',export=not as_dll}
luac = c.program{'luac',lib,src=LUAC,needs='math'}
default {lua,luac}
More details can be found in doc/index.md
Released under the MIT/X11 licence, Steve Donovan, 2010-2013