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Currently cannot support multiple languages or non-clike languages

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
c, cpp, objective-c, rust, zig
Domain
build-system, tooling

Research direction

No files, tests, or implementation entry points are named. Start by reviewing the existing CPS specification and its treatment of language-specific components, then determine how the proposed languages structure would fit. Done means agreeing on a language-agnostic schema and its ABI and key-value semantics for current and future languages.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement help wanted need discussion

I've been thinking about replacing pkg-config a lot, and one of the real short comings of pkg-config is that it assumes C (and C++ and ObjC kinda work because of that), but trying to use a newer language like Rust, Zig, or D is pretty painful, or just impossible. CPS kinda supports non-C languages through it's Type: "jar" mechanism, but that means each language has to be hard coded. It also means that you have to duplicate keys like c-runtime-vendor and cpp-runtime-vendor. I'd propose instead something like this:

{
  "platform": {
    "languages": {
      "c": {
        "runtime-vendor": "gnu",
      },
      "rust": {
        ...
       }
     }
  },
  "components": {
    "sample": {
      "language": "c",
      "type": "dylib",
      ...
     }
  }
}

This necessitates a couple of things: that the keys and their values in each component are language specific:" ie, rust doesn't provide a rust dynamic ABI, only a rust static lib ABI, but a component can be built with rust that provides a C ABI.

I think that solving the problems of future languages is really critical to making anything replacing pkg-config a success.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
191
Forks
13
No merged PRs in 30d

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