bearbuild

A less-sucky, modern and quick Ninja compatible build system in Rust. It is designed to be a smaller, modern, and memory safe replacement for the Meson build system.

features

• Fully memory safe
• Actually human readable error messages
• Simple glob based source discovery
• Smaller codebase than alternatives
• Single configuration file

installing

from source

You will need Rust and Cargo installed to compile Bearbuild from source.

git clone https://github.com/xorlaw/bearbuild
cd bearbuild
cargo build --release

The release build profile will create a leaner and more optimized binary. However, the release binary takes noticeably longer to compile than some other options. If you are on a lower end machine, you can compile using the debug profile which is slower but easier to compile. You can compile with the debug profile by simply adding the debug flag when building with Cargo.

The binary will be at target/release/bearbuild. Copy it somewhere on your PATH:

cp target/release/bearbuild ~/.local/bin/

usage

1. create your project layout

project/
  bear.toml
  src/
    main.c
    util.c
  include/
    util.h

2. write a basic bear.toml file

[project]
name    = "myproject"
version = "0.1.0"
 
[build]
compiler = "gcc"
std      = "c11"
sources  = ["src/*.c"]
includes = ["include"]
flags    = ["-Wall", "-Wextra"]
 
[output]
binary = "myproject"

3. build

bearbuild       # generates build.ninja
ninja           # compiles your project
./project     # run it

bear.toml reference

[project]

Key	Type	Required	Description
name	string	yes	Name of the project
version	string	yes	Version string (e.g. "1.0.0")

[build]

Key	Type	Required	Description
compiler	string	yes	Compiler binary to use (e.g. "gcc", "clang")
std	string	yes	C standard to pass to -std= (e.g. "c11", "c99")
sources	list	yes	Source file globs or paths (e.g. ["src/*.c"])
includes	list	no	Include directories, passed as -I flags
flags	list	no	Extra compiler flags (e.g. ["-Wall", "-O2"])

[deps] (optional)

Key	Type	Description
pkgs	list	Package names as passed to pkg-config

Example:

[deps]
pkgs = ["libpng", "zlib"]

[output]

Key	Type	Required	Description
binary	string	yes	Name of the output binary

licensing

Licensed under The Unlicense.