This completely removes the old system of mkfiles.pl + Recipe + .R
files that I used to manage the various per-platform makefiles and
other build scripts in this code base. In its place is a
CMakeLists.txt setup, which is still able to compile for Linux,
Windows, MacOS, NestedVM and Emscripten.
The main reason for doing this is because mkfiles.pl was a horrible
pile of unmaintainable cruft. It was hard to keep up to date (e.g.
didn't reliably support the latest Visual Studio project files); it
was so specific to me that nobody else could maintain it (or was even
interested in trying, and who can blame them?), and it wasn't even
easy to _use_ if you weren't me. And it didn't even produce very good
makefiles.
In fact I've been wanting to hurl mkfiles.pl in the bin for years, but
was blocked by CMake not quite being able to support my clang-cl based
system for cross-compiling for Windows on Linux. But CMake 3.20 was
released this month and fixes the last bug in that area (it had to do
with preprocessing of .rc files), so now I'm unblocked!
CMake is not perfect, but it's better at mkfiles.pl's job than
mkfiles.pl was, and it has the great advantage that lots of other
people already know about it.
Other advantages of the CMake system:
- Easier to build with. At least for the big three platforms, it's
possible to write down a list of build commands that's actually the
same everywhere ("cmake ." followed by "cmake --build ."). There's
endless scope for making your end-user cmake commands more fancy
than that, for various advantages, but very few people _have_ to.
- Less effort required to add a new puzzle. You just add a puzzle()
statement to the top-level CMakeLists.txt, instead of needing to
remember eight separate fiddly things to put in the .R file. (Look
at the reduction in CHECKLST.txt!)
- The 'unfinished' subdirectory is now _built_ unconditionally, even
if the things in it don't go into the 'make install' target. So
they won't bit-rot in future.
- Unix build: unified the old icons makefile with the main build, so
that each puzzle builds without an icon, runs to build its icon,
then relinks with it.
- Windows build: far easier to switch back and forth between debug
and release than with the old makefiles.
- MacOS build: CMake has its own .dmg generator, which is surely
better thought out than my ten-line bodge.
- net reduction in the number of lines of code in the code base. In
fact, that's still true _even_ if you don't count the deletion of
mkfiles.pl itself - that script didn't even have the virtue of
allowing everything else to be done exceptionally concisely.
I've been thinking for a while that it's about time I did that. Those
images used to link to the Java versions of the puzzles, back when
Java was the in-browser applet platform of choice; then I made them
not link to either one when it wasn't clear which system would win;
but now JS has clearly won, it's past time the images linked to the JS
puzzles, as the obviously sensible default.
Not sure how I managed to write the former by mistake, but I didn't
notice because browsers didn't immediately complain. Still, James
Harvey points out, it ought to be turned into the actually
standards-compliant spelling of the tag. Ahem.
This should simplify the process of adding a new puzzle, by automating
the part where I have to manually edit index.html separately from the
main build step.
