[GSoC 2022] Ham: Status Update

Hello everyone. This is a brief update on the Ham project - a drop in replacement for the Jam build system. For those more curious about the technical details, there will be a larger blog post on Ham’s action modifier implementation coming soon.

What’s been done so far?

The majority of the work has been in implementing Jam language features. Today, Ham hit a major milestone by supporting all of Jam’s action modifiers (updated, together, quietly, piecemeal, ignore, and existing). Ham specifies the semantics of these modifiers in much greater detail than Jam, and has improved performance (especially with piecemeal). This means you should see better performance on commands like jam clean. Centralized documentation of Ham’s language semantics is ongoing, but you can see the discussions and remaining tasks on the language issue tracker.

There’s also been plenty of documentation improvements, bug fixes, miscellaneous features, and (in-progress) refactoring to make better use of the C++ standard library.

Ham is currently able to build itself, meaning it can parse the built-in rules and build a shared library/binary correctly.

What’s left to do?

The current goal is to do a successful build of Haiku, which you can track on the GitHub milestone. This should weed out most remaining major bugs.

After that, there’s plenty of work to do, including:

• More documentation (#64, #63, #16)
• Better platform compatibility, including Windows support (#27)
• Better debugging output (debug issues)
• Support for outputting a clangd compilation database
• Syntax highlighting for major editors
• Refactoring to use standard parsing/testing libraries

You can always track what’s being worked on on the Ham project board.