Button: A fast, correct, and elegantly simple build system.

[Jason White via Digitalmars-d-announce]

I am pleased to finally announce the build system I've been 
slowly working on for over a year in my spare time:

     Docs:   http://jasonwhite.github.io/button/
     Source: https://github.com/jasonwhite/button

Features:

- Correct incremental builds.
- Automatic dependency detection (for any build task, even shell 
scripts).
- Build graph visualization using GraphViz.
- Language-independent. It can build anything.
- Can automatically build when an input file is modified (using 
inotify).
- Recursive: It can build the build description as part of the 
build.
- Lua is the primary build description language.

A ton of design work went into this. Over the past few years, I 
went through many different designs and architectures. I finally 
settled on this one about a year ago and then went to work on 
implementing it. I am very happy with how it turned out.

Note that this is still a ways off from being production-ready. 
It needs some polishing. Feedback would be most appreciated (file 
some issues!). I really want to make this one of the best build 
systems out there.

Here is an example build description for DMD:

     https://github.com/jasonwhite/dmd/blob/button/src/BUILD.lua

I'd say that's a lot easier to read than this crusty thing:

     https://github.com/dlang/dmd/blob/master/src/posix.mak

In fact, there is some experimental support for automatic 
conversion of Makefiles to Button's build description format 
using a fork of GNU Make itself: 
https://github.com/jasonwhite/button-make

Finally, a few notes:

- I was hoping to give a talk on this at DConf, but sadly my 
submission was turned down. :'(

- I am aware of Reggae, another build system written in D. 
Although, I admit I haven't looked at it very closely. I am 
curious how it compares.

- You might also be interested in the two other libraries I wrote 
specifically for this project:

   - https://github.com/jasonwhite/darg (A command-line parser)
   - https://github.com/jasonwhite/io (An IO streams library)