Nice to see GN there. I wish more people knew about it.
For me is as powerful as Bazel, but without the need for a JVM and all the insanity that comes with it in a desktop/dev environment.
The syntax is great, powerful (insane customization) and together with Ninja theres nothing like it.
Its in C++ and even being as powerful as Bazel, its a light, standalone library that can handle a huge amount of source code, dependencies, tools and configurations.
Having tried to battle GN configs... I don't agree.
I was working on a big source tree and got frustrated that it kept rebuilding files that hasn't changed just because I switched git branches to look at one file, and then suddenly "Yay, another 18 hour full rebuild!".
I tried to fix it and found there is no option to ignore file timestamps, and some guy has tried to patch it to do that[1]... But the patch requires putting an option in GN files which seems to break them wherever I put it... I tried to patch GN, but it wouldn't ever seem to pass that option through... Ended up patching Ninja to always have the option on, but then random other operations broke (like simple file copies).
A day wasted, and problem not solved. Maybe my use case isn't common, or a bad workman blames his tools, but for me at least it wasn't a nice experience.
For me is as powerful as Bazel, but without the need for a JVM and all the insanity that comes with it in a desktop/dev environment.
The syntax is great, powerful (insane customization) and together with Ninja theres nothing like it.
Its in C++ and even being as powerful as Bazel, its a light, standalone library that can handle a huge amount of source code, dependencies, tools and configurations.