[Development] Notes on "Qt Build Systems" @ QtCon 2016

[Kevin Kofler]

Jake Petroules wrote:
> Again, useless, because Qbs is more powerful and at a much higher level of
> abstraction, so a generator would only be useful in the reverse direction.

Of course, the generator would not use all the features of Qbs, just the 
minimum subset that is needed to do the work.

> It's like trying to make a compiler to transform Motorola 68k assembler to
> C++. Only the reverse transformation of that can done in a useful manner.

That is not a reasonable comparison. Assembly code is not designed to be 
compiled to anything other than the corresponding machine code. Code can be 
self-modifying, there are hardware-dependent I/O ports, etc. The CMake 
language is designed exactly to perform configuration and then output build 
files for all sorts of build systems: make, Ninja, various IDEs, etc.

But of course, all the configury would be done at CMake time and Qbs would 
just be tasked to do the actual build, as a make replacement. Will somebody 
be interested enough in implementing that? Probably not. But if make is 
really the issue, it could be done.

        Kevin Kofler