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On 5/31/2011 8:10 AM, Joshua Cranmer wrote:
> On 05/30/2011 09:56 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> In message<is19e0$pae$1@speranza.aioe.org>, Nasser M. Abbasi wrote:
>>
>>> Just understanding the makefiles, never mind the 2 million
>>> lines or so source code with the #ifdefs in them, was a
>>> nightmare :)
>>
>> Didn’t you have GNU autoconf to deal with all of that for you?
>
> Understanding GNU autoconf is half the battle. It's written in a macro
> language no one really understands, so half the code is copy-pasted.
>
> Besides, all autoconf gets you is setting up the hundreds of #defines.
> It does nothing else with respect to the #ifdef mess.
>

yeah, and it doesn't exactly tend to work well for non-Linux operating 
systems (such as Windows...). apparently its main point is mostly to 
deal with a lot of the internal inconsistency between the various Linux 
distros.


hence, my personal preference for plain makefiles (with none of the 
autoconf mess). with care, one can get Windows+MSVC and Linux+GCC to 
work with pretty much the same core makefiles, reducing the pain of 
doing the whole parallel-makefile-tree thing.

I guess there is also CMake and similar, but personally I have been a 
bit too lazy to bother with it (although not perfect, my makefiles work 
well enough, so it is hard to justify replacing them).


personally, I have found it to be less effort to not bother excluding 
platform-specific source-files from the build, and instead make the 
files essentially no-op if not being compiled on the correct target.

#include <mylibheader.h>
#ifdef MY_OS_OF_INTEREST
... stuff ...
#endif
//EOF


also, having headers which examine information generally already 
provided by the compiler (things like the OS, CPU architecture, ... are 
generally already provided by various defines, although typically they 
are compiler-specific, so it makes sense in the headers to "normalize 
them"), and thus setting up lots of relevant #defines.

for example:
#ifdef _MSC_VER
#ifdef _M_IX86
#define X86
#define LITTLEENDIAN
...
#endif
#ifdef _M_IX64
#define X86_64
#define LITTLEENDIAN
...
#endif
...
#endif
#ifdef __GNUC__
#ifdef __i386__
...
#endif
...
#endif
...