Pcons: a new open-source software build tool

I’ve been a C/C++ programmer most of my life. I wrote my first programs in the 1970s, so most of my professional life has been a sequence like this: write some code, build it, and debug it. The tools we use to do that second part, the build step, have gotten considerably better since make was written at Bell Labs in 1976[^make]. For many years at GenArts, I used, and helped develop, SCons. It was pretty great in those days; it built a complete graph of the code and executed it in parallel, build descriptions were written in python, not some one-off domain-specific language you had to learn. SCons is still in use in some very big projects, and I was proud of the work we did on it. But it is stuck in the python idioms of the 1990s and hasn’t been able to keep up with the times, and never achieved the traction we were hoping for. [^make]: First publicly released with Unix v7 in 1979; I didn’t use it til the '80s. Over the years, CMake became dominant as the way to build C and C++…