SCons

The Cons software construction utility, written in Perl, was created by Bob Sidebotham in 1999.^[3] It served as a base for the ScCons build tool, a design which won the Software Carpentry project SC Build competition in August 2000.^[4] ScCons was the foundation for SCons.

SCons inspired the creation of Waf, formerly known as SCons/BKsys, which emerged in the KDE community. For some time, there were plans to use it as the build tool for KDE 4 and beyond, but that effort was abandoned in favor of CMake.^[5]

Notable projects that use SCons (or used it at one time) include: The Battle for Wesnoth,^[6] Battlefield 1942,^{[citation needed]} Doom 3,^[7] gem5,^[8] gpsd,^[9] GtkRadiant,^[10] Madagascar,^[11] Nullsoft Scriptable Install System,^[12] OpenNebula,^[13] VMware,^{[citation needed]}, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory,^[14] XORP and MCA2,^[15] openpilot^[16] and Godot.^[17]

.csig is the SCons Content Signature file format.

Major features include:

• Configuration files are Python; user-written builds can leverage a general-purpose, cross-platform programming language
• Dependency analysis for C, C++ and Fortran
• Dependency analysis is extensible through user-defined scanners for other languages or file types; unlike GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) dependency analysis, SCons uses a regular expression scan for included source files
• Built-in support for C, C++, D, Java, Fortran, Objective-C, Yacc, Lex, Qt and SWIG, as well as TeX and LaTeX documents
• Support for other languages via custom builders
• Building from central repositories of source code and pre-built targets
• Ability to use Visual Studio, including the generation of .dsp, .dsw, .sln and .vcproj files
• Detection of file content changes using MD5 signatures; optional, configurable ability to use traditional timestamps
• Ability to do parallel builds, maintaining a specified number of jobs running simultaneously regardless of directory hierarchy
• Autoconf-like support for finding #include files, libraries, functions and typedefs
• Global view of dependencies, so multiple build passes or reordering targets is not required.
• Ability to share built files in a cache to speed up multiple builds - like ccache but for any type of target file, not just C/C++ compilation
• Designed from the ground up for cross-platform builds; known to work on POSIX systems (including Linux, AIX and OS/2, *BSD Unices, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Solaris, illumos), Windows NT, OS X

The following is an SConstruct file that builds a hello world C program using the default platform compiler:

Program("hello-world.c")

The following is a SConstruct file for a project that includes two source files and specifies build tool options:

env = Environment()
env.Append(CPPFLAGS=["-Wall", "-g"])
env.Program("hello", ["hello.c", "main.c"])

• Buildout
• qmake – Software build automation tool
• Qbs (build tool)
• Premake – Cross-platform build tool for configuring platform-specific builds
• List of build automation software