Show HN: Beast – A Build System

Re:Show HN: Beast – A Build System by gaurav1804 on Monday July 04, 2022 @09:28AM (#31976805)

Hi! Basically it is supposed to do what Make does... but in a faster and more user-friendly way. Note that Make doesn't have the best syntax. But Beast has sort of a 'python' syntax. It supports strings and integers. Variable modification assignment. It even supports scoping (within and outside beast build rules).

Plus, it is an order of a magnitude faster than Make. All in all, I don't agree with the fact that it's syntax is similar to Make. Well for one thing it has legible special variable names like 'out' and 'dep'.

So yes, while it is a low level build system, it is an improvement over Make in terms of syntax and speed.

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Re:Show HN: Beast – A Build System by dale_glass on Monday July 04, 2022 @09:37AM (#31976889)

How is it faster? And faster at what?

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Re:Show HN: Beast – A Build System by gaurav1804 on Monday July 04, 2022 @12:54PM (#31979166)

By 'faster' I mean better build times than Make for a project of particular size. Benchmarking is going on right now, and the difference in performance is clearly visible.

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Re:Show HN: Beast – A Build System by dale_glass on Monday July 04, 2022 @01:11PM (#31979412)

Okay, but what specifically is faster?

Make is rarely a big bottleneck, except in very pathologically written projects, and when doing incremental builds. I think the main problem with big make setups is recursive make, which prevents it from having a global view on the project, and forces the main make to execute many sub-makes recursively, all of which has overhead.

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Re:Show HN: Beast – A Build System by gaurav1804 on Thursday July 07, 2022 @03:37AM (#32010965)

The build process is faster. There are a number of algorithms running (on several threads) while building. That is where optimisation kicks in.

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Re:Show HN: Beast – A Build System by aidenn0 on Monday July 04, 2022 @10:57PM (#31983837)

I suspect they are benchmarking recursive make vs recursive beast; the very first example in the readme suggests recursion

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Re:Show HN: Beast – A Build System by dale_glass on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @05:52AM (#31986291)

Good point. I have to say I'm wary of that, recursive make is not a good idea, and the problem can't be fixed by building a better make, because the issue is that it breaks up the dependency graph and creates build problems.

Eg, if you have src/lib, and src/bin, and the src/bin project depends on the src/lib library, then in self-contained, recursively invoked makefiles (or anything else), you won't get a correct behavior when a header in the library changes.

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Re:Show HN: Beast – A Build System by aidenn0 on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @10:58AM (#31988999)

Other make replacements have solved this by making the dependency graph independent of the file structure. Hopefully beast does this too

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Re:Show HN: Beast – A Build System by dale_glass on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @01:34PM (#31991206)

What do you mean? make has no particular requirements regarding the file structure. You can write a single giant Makefile covering a directory tree with thousands of source files in various directories.

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Re:Show HN: Beast – A Build System by aidenn0 on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @01:51PM (#31991433)

I meant independent of the (make-replacement)file structure. As long as the dependency graph isn't restricted to a single build file, then most of the inherent issues with recursive make are avoided.

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