bats

[mcandre]

https://github.com/sstephenson/bats

[mcandre]

May write some toy examples to accompany the UNIX shell script examples, just Hello Worlds.

But as for managing portable scripts, that is better handled with more mature languages. For example, Go projects can use Mage. Haskell projects can use Shake. Node.js projects can use Grunt. Rust projects can use tinyrick. D projects can use Dale. Ruby projects can use Rake. And so on.

WSL has fortunately progress to the point that POSIX sh scripts can often serve for needs on Windows machines. Let's not talk about PowerShell.

C and C++ appear to be the main outliers. Perhaps there is a Rake-like equivalent, obviously not make/cmake, which offers C/C++ as the scripting language. Or we could defer to Ruby, Python, or Lua for such needs.

Ideally, would be nice to be able to reuse and import certain C/C++ files into the task runner scripts, in order to automatically populate common fields such as identifying the software build version. But that would require a lot of crazy integration with make/ninja/cmake/MSVC/etc. which would take forever to implement. And the task runner reconfiguration could be slow. For this reason, the task runner can be largely independent from the underlying build tool, e.g. cmake. We'd trade a little redundancy in terms of writing very small code portions twice, in favor of supporting a wide variety of practical C/C++ build tools.

[mcandre]

Relates to #220

[mcandre]

Sadly, bats has been deprecated.