Bram Moolenaar (of VIM fame) On A-A-P

blab writes "I've posted an interview with Bram Moolenaar, of Vim fame, about his very newly released project A-A-P. Find out about 'super-make.'"

Comments

Oh?

[cjpez]

I'm impressed that it's cross-platform, too.

From the aap website:

Limitations
A-A-P is still under development, not everything works yet!

• Only Unix is currently supported.

Ant is terrible

[GusherJizmac]

Ant is a weak scripting language, with a retarded syntax, and no useful looping or conditional ability. It is the poorest build system I've ever seen, outside of "build.bat". I'm really excited for AAP, and hope it takes off and becomes usable. I personally never had a problem with make, but it's not cross-platform (because it depends on the various UNIX utilities), and ant is just so pathetically bad, and shows no signs of improving.

Re:Ant is terrible

[cjpez]

At the company I used to work for, we started using Ant for the build system for a number of our projects, and it ended up working out really well. It'd do all the automatic downloading of files and dependencies, etc. We could use it to build up a development environment in no time at all (just install Java/Ant and then run one command to have everything automatically do cvs checkouts, compile, and all that good stuff). It also made installations a breeze - we cut back on our software install time by a phenomenal amount, because all we needed to do was run one or two commands.

Not that you couldn't do all that stuff in some other way, but it did work out really well for us. The XML-ish syntax was a little hokey, but we had defined so many targets for ourselves that it made life really easy.