tabi

Tabi (a type of Japanese sock) is a build system written in C that uses C to describe build rules. The only dependencies are a C99 compiler for build system generation and ninja to execute the generated build files. The logic follows CMake, but the syntax is C.

Note: currently, this is a toy project that addresses the annoying fact that (meta) build systems are usually not written in the same language as the code they build.

Usage

1. Drop a build.tabi.c file in your project root. This is similar to a Makefile or CMakeLists.txt.
2. Bootstrap tabi once, e.g. by

mkdir build
cd build
cc -o bootstrap ../build.tabi.c && ./bootstrap ../ . && rm bootstrap

3. From now on, just run ninja in the build folder to build your project. The build system will update itself when build.tabi.c changes.

Acknowledgements

Inspired by nob