Waf

For other meanings, see WAF (disambiguation).

Waf

Developer(s)	Thomas Nagy
Stable release	1.6.10 / December 17, 2011; 60 days ago (2011-12-17)
Written in	Python^[1]
Operating system	Windows, POSIX
Type	Software development tools
License	New BSD License
Website	waf.googlecode.com

Waf is a Build automation tool - a program that assists in the automatic compilation and installation of other programs or libraries.

1 Features
2 Requirements
3 History
4 Example Waf file
5 Notable applications
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

Features

General

Portable to Unix and non-Unix systems
Lightweight
Offers a Turing-complete programming language (similar to SCons)
Support for standard targets: configure, build, clean, distclean, install, and uninstall

Language Support

A C/C++ preprocessor for computing dependencies
Fortran is supported with automated detection of Module dependencies
Support for OCaml and hybrid programs, support for GNOME programs
Support for the D programming language (both gdc and dmd are supported)
Support for C#, Java, Python project
Provides various tools for processing DocBook, man pages, intltool/msgfmt

Other

Colored output and progress bar display
Scripts are Python modules
XML script front-end and a dedicated, easy-to-parse "IDE output" mode to ease the interaction with integrated development environments
Modular configuration scheme with customizable command-line parsing
Daemon mode for background recompilation
Find source files intelligently (glob()-like) to ease script maintenance
Support for global object cache to avoid unnecessary recompilations
Support for unit tests run on programs at the end of builds

Requirements

No installation required: the waf script (only 95 KB) can be distributed and used directly
Python is an external dependency

History

Thomas Nagy created a build automation tool called BKsys which was designed to sit on top of SCons, providing higher-level functionality similar to that of Autotools. When Thomas Nagy decided that SCons' fundamental issues (most notably the poor scalability) were too complex and time-consuming to fix, he started a complete rewrite which he named Waf.

In 2005 the KDE project considered moving from Autotools to SCons and BKsys in its builds, but a year later the decision was made to instead use CMake. Waf was still in a very early pre-alpha stage at that point.^[2]

Example Waf file

Below is a very simple wscript that would compile a source called "hello-world.c" using the platform default c-compiler:

top = '.'
out = 'build'
 
def options(opt):
    opt.load('compiler_c')
 
def configure(conf):
    conf.load('compiler_c')
 
def build(bld):
    bld.program(source = 'hello-world.c', target = 'hello-world', features = 'c cprogram')

The project is built with the following command line:

waf configure build

Notable applications

Waf is used to build software by a number of different free and open source projects.

Waf

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