Build system system

[PixelRifts]

No that double system in the title is not in fact a typo.

With any new project I make I find myself copying over a set of files like a build.bat and run.bat and some boilerplate everywhere. Every different language project seems to have its own setup procedure I tend to follow. Along with that, a simple build.bat can't really easily do incremental building or anything even a little complicated.

What if we had a single executable (based on some dll plugins) that could set up projects and even handle builds for us based on some file format (kind of like how premake or gradle do it, but language specific stuff goes into dlls)
Gradle has tried to be this, but it doesnt allow for many of the languages people care about, and also, it's versioning system is very weird and unwieldy.

If anybody wants to set up language support, it can be as simple as drag and drop a dll along with the exe. Hence it's a system for building "build systems" but a bit more.

The main thing that could be provided here is a simple lexer for cli arguments and some utilities for parsing and working with this specific file format easily

The PROS for this would be:

• Single Utility tool for making, building, running and whatever else you might want to do for any language project.
• Easy to set up your own custom stuff through dlls

[matu3ba]

Not sure about other languages and how it is supposed to exactly work, but Zig tries to establish different runners and I suspect they are meant to be freely composable.
The idea is to build your build binary from a library and run it (sandboxed). With native backends and no slow backend to emit assembly this should be faster beyond some threshold than most scripted solutions.
The build binary is also cached.

simple lexer for cli arguments

What do you want to do with the lexer then, which can not be done within the program? Remind, that shell escape codes may affect the shell in weird ways (so you would need to read input from the program or have big complexity of interpreting shell shennanigans).

some utilities for parsing and working with this specific file format easily

Another build system DSL?