SCons is a software construction tool.
Think of SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches such as ccache. In short, SCons is an easier, more reliable and faster way to build software.
This is free and open source software.
Features include:
- Configuration files are Python scripts–use the power of a real programming language to solve build problems.
- Reliable, automatic dependency analysis built-in for C, C++ and Fortran–no more “make depend” or “make clean” to get all of the dependencies. Dependency analysis is easily extensible through user-defined dependency Scanners for other languages or file types.
- Built-in support for C, C++, D, Java, Fortran, Yacc, Lex, Qt and SWIG, and building TeX and LaTeX documents. Easily extensible through user-defined Builders for other languages or file types.
- Building from central repositories of source code and/or pre-built targets.
- Built-in support for Microsoft Visual Studio, including generation of .dsp, .dsw, .sln and .vcproj files.
- Reliable detection of build changes using MD5 signatures; optional, configurable support for traditional timestamps.
- Support for parallel builds–like make -j but keeps N jobs running simultaneously regardless of directory hierarchy.
- Integrated Autoconf-like support for finding #include files, libraries, functions and typedefs.
- Global view of all dependencies–no more multiple build passes or reordering targets to build everything.
- Ability to share built files in a cache to speed up multiple builds–like ccache but for any type of target file, not just C/C++ compilation.
- Designed from the ground up for cross-platform builds, and known to work on Linux, other POSIX systems (including AIX, BSD systems, HP/UX, IRIX and Solaris), Windows 7/8/10, MacOS, and OS/2.
Website: scons.org
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: The SCons Foundation
License: MIT License
SCons is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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