Comparison of Please.Build and XMake

xmake runs on windows, pb doesn't.

xmake has perfunctory documentation and most of the examples involve taking apart the lua code and reverse engineering it.

pb has good documentation and a repo of community examples you can use to add support for your own builders. it's easy and simple builders can be around 7 lines.

xmake has the ability to output static makefiles that do not need xmake. which is nice for making distributable packages.

pb requires being installed; altough it offers an easy installer people can use which will download and run itself for a particular package.

xmake builds in place?

pb does "hermetic builds." a sandbox is created for each build step to run within, the particular files a job will work with are linked in to the workspace and moved out of it on completion. this prevents jobs from possibly getting contaminated by files which are not somehow declared for use.

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i would probably use please.build if it ran on windows since i need to build things there. for server software that can afford to be linux-only it's not as much of a problem.

xmake would have been an acceptable second but i need to work with upstream to get documentation that works. adding your own code generators requires a whole penance of lines of lua and while it looks straightforward it's not documented well.