Embedthis Bit

Bit means Build It, and it is a modern replacement for the venerable make and not so popular autoconf utilities.

Bit builds directly or generates native Makefiles and IDE projects. It provides a higher level of abstraction for defining software builds.

 

 

Download

Bit is still under active development, but to get a sneak preview, download and try it out.

Embedthis Bit™ Features

Bit is implemented primarily as a single Javascript program and is very hackable. It has the following major features:

• Configuration and component discovery (replaces autoconf)
• Compiler capability sleuthing
• Generation of a configuration source header (bit.h)
• Generation of Xcode, Visual Studio, Make, Nmake and shell script projects
• Automatic C/C++ source code dependencies
• Cross platform. Easily handles Windows, Linux and Mac builds
• Cross-compilation support
• Building outside source tree for read-only file systems
• Bit files are Javascript source and are easily modified and extended
• Multiple build profiles (debug, release, ...)
• Very fast configuration and building times, even on windows
• Bit is Open Source and can be used freely under the GPL license.

Nice Bits

While Bit has a strong feature set, there are some characteristics that make building with Bit especially nice:

• Unified project view, no "make" style recursion required
• Bit configuration may be comprised of multiple bit files
• Bit file targets and scripts are relative to their own directory
• Targets can be named symbolically not just by the target path.
• Bit provides a "why" option (bit --why) to display why a target was or was not rebuilt
• Bit files and targets intelligently inherit of outer project properties