Mim: the build system you always wanted

The word mim means any of the following:

• an incorrect way of writing 1999 in roman numbers (as in "we gonna party like it's 1999"),
• the Madame Mim from the Disney movie Sword in the Stone,
• Swedish for "mime" meaning "imitating"
• a figure in Norse mythology renowned for his wisdom
• an acronym for "Mim Isn't Make"

   it's also the name of the build system I've been thinking and working of for a while. This post is about what Mim is now and what it can become. Text in red describes stuff that isn't implemented yet, text in yellow is things that are kind-of implemented, and text in black describes implemented features. First, I'll describe how Mim is different from other build systems and why it's better.

Problem

The problems with traditional build system are:

• make sure the dependencies are correct and built in the right order (think: make depend && make && make install),
• be sure of that every built file you see is up to date,
• hard understand how a software project is built (what are the artifacts? where are they stored? what are the dependencies?),
• hard to understand which variables a build have (e.g., make DEBUG=1)

Solution

   The solution to these problem is (of course) Mim. With Mim you clearly see all artifact the build system produces, how they are built, and when they need to be built. In fact, you can see the artifacts, e.g., by doing ls, before they are built. In other words, using your normal command line tools you can browse the project file tree to find the artifact you need (to run, to view, to copy, etc.) without building anything. Sounds like magic? Keep reading...

Read more: Programmatically Speaking

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