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A comment on The only build system that might someday replace make (2010).

Re:The only build system that might someday replace make (2010) by raphlinus on Saturday November 23, 2019 @07:01PM (#21617434)
From my recent Twitter mentions: Build Systems à la Carte (2018). This presents a theoretical analysis of build systems (which they have defined broadly enough to include Microsoft Excel) and how to pick and choose the various properties they provide.

This came up because I am promoting a conceptually similar unified theory of Reactive UI, which also has things in common with build systems. In fact, Svelte also happens to cite Excel as an inspiration for its approach to incremental updates. My blog post on this went live yesterday, and a birdie tells me it will hit the HN front page later today.

[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...

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Re:The only build system that might someday replace make (2010) by sansnomme on Saturday November 23, 2019 @08:38PM (#21617798)
Have you considered making a compiler plugin for Rust so Svelte style GUIs are possible? Reactivity should have first class support just like concurrency (which too have a runtime).
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Re:The only build system that might someday replace make (2010) by raphlinus on Saturday November 23, 2019 @11:27PM (#21618351)
Wow, that's seriously off topic for a post about build systems, isn't it? :)

The Rust ecosystem does not support "compiler plugins" well (by contrast, this is a first-class concept in Kotlin). What is being actively pursued is "procedural macros," but we're running into the limitations of those - we're moving away from them for deriving lenses, for example.

I'm sure it would also bring up lifetime issues, but, to be fair, those are probably similar to issues for async, and that only took a couple of years or so to land. But people are actively thinking about using generators for UI.

I do think this is one of the open questions. It might be that really first-rate reactivity does require language support in some way. But this feels like like increasing the scope of an already possibly overambitious problem.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The only build system that might someday replace make (2010) by sansnomme on Sunday November 24, 2019 @12:11AM (#21618501)
To be fair, the UX for building Svelte-style GUIs is pretty unparalleled. It feels a lot like SwiftUI. The React variety with setState and Redux creates a ton of verbose code.
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