sokol-tools

Yeah, it's outdated crap and doesn't work on Windows with MSVC, better use an actual cross-platform build tool from the current century ;) Proper build tooling still doesn't change the fact that you need to stamp out one binary per OS and CPU architecture, potentially using different compilers. This is always brittle (I would know: https://github.com/floooh/sokol-tools/actions/runs/107248810...)

I was researching this the other day, here is a non trivial example: https://github.com/floooh/sokol-tools/blob/master/build.zig Here is a tutorial: https://www.zvm.app/tutorials/zig-build-cpp.html

I would really love being able to take any POSIX command line tool, compile that to WASI, and run it on (at least) Linux, Windows and macOS like a regular executable without having to install a separate WASI runtime or any scare-popups showing up like on macOS. I'm a 'WASI convert' since I was able to take an ancient 8-bit assembler written in C89 in the mid-90's (http://xi6.com/projects/asmx/), compile that as-is with the WASI SDK (https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-sdk), and then integrate it into a VSCode extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=floooh.v...). A similar problem I'd like to solve better is a shader cross-compiler (https://github.com/floooh/sokol-tools) which needs to run on Linux, macOS and Windows and takes too long to build locally, thus I currently need to distribute that as pre-built binaries.

Sokol also provides a solution for shader cross-compilation (https://github.com/floooh/sokol-tools/blob/master/docs/sokol...), so you only need to write your shaders once no matter if you're targeting OpenGL, Metal, or DirectX. There are other tools you could use out there with IGL, but Sokol's solution streamlines the whole process.

> but that is only for software written in C, it does not work with C++. I have a pretty complex C++ command line tool which works just fine with MUSL and results in a distro-agnostic executable (https://github.com/floooh/sokol-tools). What potential problems should I be aware of?

In practice it works very well though, I experimented a bit with replacing cmake with build.zig for a 'not-quite-trivial' C++ project, and tbh for cross-platform code that's a lot nicer than wrestling with the arcane cmake syntax and all the C/C++ compiler toolchain differences: https://github.com/floooh/sokol-tools/blob/master/build.zig The basic idea is the same as in all other build systems: you describe your build as number of build steps and their dependencies. There's really no reason why this build description should happen in a separate build tool and language.

Yes, here is an example for a non-trivial mixed C/C++ project: https://github.com/floooh/sokol-tools/blob/master/build.zig Compared to cmake this means giving up IDE support like Xcode or Visual Studio though, it's really "just" a build system, not a meta-build system which can generate IDE project files. The Zig build system also has some minor warts that don't matter much for a pure Zig project but do matter for C/C++ projects, mainly that build settings of dependencies (like header search paths or linker input) mostly don't automatically 'travel' upwards to the root, instead each dependency and root project needs to be configured on its own. There are plenty of upsides too though, like much simplified cross-compilation, all in all it looks very promising.