Comments on: Waf: a pleasant build system

By: Johnny

Johnny — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 21:12:23 +0000

I had to use waf as one of our vendors requires and depends on it. After a lot of work put into it I can say it proudly: I’d rather write my own build system than use waf. Frankly – writing makefiles by hand is more plesant experience!

By: drahnr

drahnr — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 14:16:18 +0000

I recently stumbled upon waf, and so far it is one of the most pleasant build systems I’ve used so far. (scons, cmake, make, qmake, autotools,..)
The documentation is actually worth reading it.

By: Diwaker Gupta

Diwaker Gupta — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 04:01:41 +0000

Henk: To each his own. I’ve used Scons and find it very hard to extend, enhance and maintain. Makefiles are great to start off simple projects. In all fairness, I haven’t yet used waf for a large production project, but I’m looking forward to it. Could you clarify what you mean when you say “waf is so incredibly weird”?

By: Henk

Henk — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 14:15:33 +0000

Waf is way too difficult in practise. This actually makes it slower when you account for the time required to start using it. Scons is very easy to use and it’s pretty quick as is. Waf is actually so incredibly weird that it’s easier to use plain old make!

Sure it doesn’t have coloured output but I don’t care, I’d rather be able to log the build process without weird ANSI control codes in it.