Comment some suggestions... (Score 1) 411
While I'm not officially responsible for the build process at my workplace, I've taken that responsibility as we've been porting our code to a new operating system. Here are some things we've learned that may help you.
We recently switched from Make as our build tool to Jam which has worked great. Like you, we didn't have the option of using GCC on every platform, and Jam made it easy to configure all the operating systems we're interested in using with the fewest headaches. After using Jam for quite a while now, I think all of the developers and I are very happy with the decision to axe Make. Honestly, I can sympathize with your effort to use Make to do all your compiling since we gave it some effort before switching to Jam. Try Jam - you'll be amazed at how much simpler your build process becomes.
Whether or not you use Jam (though we use Jam to do this), setting up nightly builds, capturing the output, and sending status emails with the results makes bug finding much simpler, especially on multiple platforms. Part of the nightly builds include built in testing. If any of the tests fail, we know we've broken something in our code.
Another suggestion... Look for a threading wrapper package like CommonC++ or ZThreads. Both are fairly well developed now and make programming multithreaded applications for multiple platforms pretty easy. For multiplatform GUI tools, try FLTK. It's tiny compared to WxWindows or other bloated GUI wrappers, plus it's easy to use.
We recently switched from Make as our build tool to Jam which has worked great. Like you, we didn't have the option of using GCC on every platform, and Jam made it easy to configure all the operating systems we're interested in using with the fewest headaches. After using Jam for quite a while now, I think all of the developers and I are very happy with the decision to axe Make. Honestly, I can sympathize with your effort to use Make to do all your compiling since we gave it some effort before switching to Jam. Try Jam - you'll be amazed at how much simpler your build process becomes.
Whether or not you use Jam (though we use Jam to do this), setting up nightly builds, capturing the output, and sending status emails with the results makes bug finding much simpler, especially on multiple platforms. Part of the nightly builds include built in testing. If any of the tests fail, we know we've broken something in our code.
Another suggestion... Look for a threading wrapper package like CommonC++ or ZThreads. Both are fairly well developed now and make programming multithreaded applications for multiple platforms pretty easy. For multiplatform GUI tools, try FLTK. It's tiny compared to WxWindows or other bloated GUI wrappers, plus it's easy to use.
