Stroll

Stroll is an experiment in developing a language-agnostic build system that does not require the user to specify dependencies between individual build tasks. By "language-agnostic" I mean the user does not need to learn a new language or special file format for describing build tasks -- existing scripts or executable files can be used as build tasks directly without modification.

I call this build system Stroll because its build algorithm reminds me of strolling through a park where you've never been before, trying to figure out an optimal path to your target destination, and likely going in circles occasionally until you've built up a complete mental map of the park.

See an introductory blog post here: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/andreymokhov/stroll/.

How to try

First, build and install Stroll, e.g. using Stack:

stack install

Stroll uses the fsatrace utility for tracking file-system operations when executing build tasks. You therefore need to have fsatrace on your PATH.

Now you can try the included example:

$ cd examples/windows # or examples/linux
$ stroll build
Executing build/lib.bat...
Executing build/main.bat...
Done

Stroll will create .stroll files when executing build scripts. For example, the file build/lib.bat.stroll might look like this:

exit-code: ExitSuccess
operations:
  bin/lib/lib.o:
    write: 16b8739d090e7c2ccd1bf38130c2d3b82071182bd4a53177c7bde08fcb0a719e
  build/lib.bat:
    read: 4e0ec561c9a00e3184f8cc3ad847cdecb0e7174ddb51144f81eb18c779927df5
  src/lib/lib.h:
    read: aea5eaf14b630a535e0d6ddd15adc721a43a112c2ef645d8a02d2e55cd5ce231
  src/lib/lib.c:
    read: 244f7e2a4de64201b6a44637de36d6dba9225c58d5f29debaf0f39f53ea770cf

To visualise the dependency graph you can run Stroll with the -g flag, redirecting the output to a program that can render dot files:

$ stroll -g build | dot -Tpng -Gdpi=600 -o graph.png