Welcome to the New Year!
We‘ll get started right with the first article of 2014 on a build
system written in Haskell called shake.
Larger software projects (almost) all use a build system to automatically create a finished software product from source code. This includes, for example, compiling source files, linking object files, generating documentation, or assembling distribution archives.
This blog article provides an introduction to the shake build system, written in Haskell. This system has the advantage that dependencies between build artifacts can arise dynamically, i.e., while the build system is running. With make, probably the best-known build system, dependencies must be known before invoking the build system, which in practice often leads to limitations and problems.
We use shake at our company to compile our product Checkpad MED. Here shake plays to its full strengths, as an important component of the Checkpad infrastructure is code generation. Thanks to dynamic dependencies, it is possible to compile the program that generates the code, generate the code itself, and compile and link the generated code with a single invocation of the build system.
Neil Mitchell, the author of shake, developed a variant of the tool for use at Standard Chartered to efficiently compile really large software projects. Details on this as well as detailed information on shake‘s internal architecture can be found in this article.
Read on...