Chicot

This is the repository for the new build system for UVA Rocketry. It's "just a build.zig script"

But why?

It's a very reasonable question why a repo with 3k+ lines of zig just to build some c++ even needs to exist. So, why?

There are numerous reasons, most of them boil down to the fact that platformio's build system is... pretty bad:

• building for desktop targets or python modules (like we need for RocketPy testing and generic testing) is (afaik) impossible on platformio
• due to the above reason, easily sharing build flags across platformio and whatever other build system we use is basically impossible
• allowing transitive dependencies on our repos is needlessly difficult because it requires us to maintain a separate library.json file (which adds a third source of truth to builds?)
• integrating zig code into our code is very sus right now, even though it would be very beneficial in some places
• LSP information generation is NOT possible to do not manually right now (at least with a fancy build.zig script, cmake could probably be done easily though, but I don't want to EVER touch cmake)

Solution

The solution is this monstrosity of a build script. It autogenerates:

1. platformio.ini
2. library.json (for dependencies to be usable from platformio)
3. LSP Information

Since this script is just a build.zig script, users can modify the returned modules to add all their own special information, making this super powerful. Also, since it's a "just" build.zig script it will ALSO build zig code, which enables using zig's testing system, which is LEAGUES better than C++ testing

How to use

With Chicot, ALL information comes from the build.zig.zon file. This makes it so that there is ONLY one source of truth about the build

Commands

There are a few commands to use different aspects of chicot:

Lsp Information Generation

Fortunately, getting up and running writing code inside your editor is super easy. First, you must build everything with zig build (or zig build -Dmode=... if you want to specify a specific mode)

Then, all you have to do is zig build lsp -p . (or zig build lsp -p . -Dmode=...)

This command will always modify the compile_flags.txt in the same directory as the build.zig.zon file

Lsp usage in vscode

Unfortunately, chicot does not currently support lsp information generation for Microsoft's C/C++ Extension. If you want autocomplete and all those nice features inside vscode, install the clangd extension. Vscode should prompt you to disable intellisense after the installation of clangd, which you should accept.

If you have updated the lsp information (with zig build lsp -p .) but clangd is still showing errors then save the file and everything should start working again.

Platformio.ini generation

If a project is setup to use platformio for the embedded build system, then you will need to run zig build pio -p . to autogenerate the platformio.ini and accompanying checkpio.py build files. If the platformio.ini file is out of sync with Chicot's current build info, then platformio will prompt you to rerun zig build pio -p . when you next run pio run ...

Platformio Library Usage

If you want to package up your current project as a platformio library, then run zig build libraryjson to generate the library.json file that platformio needs. Note that this will NOT package up zig exported symbols, so use this with care