AMBuild API (2.0)

AMBuild scripts have access to the following object types:

• Context: Exposed as the builder, this is the entry point for the API and is known as a configure context.
• NodeBuilder: Represents a node in the dependency graph that may or may not be committed to the database.
• Compiler: An abstraction representing a C++ compiler environment.
• Vendor: An abstraction representing a C++ compiler vendor (GCC, MSVC, Clang, etc).
• BinaryBuilder: An abstraction for building C++ compilation jobs.

As a general rule, AMBuild uses the following conventions:

• Methods starting with an upper-case letter are considered public API.
• Methods starting with a lower-case letter are considered private and should not be used.
• Properties and attributes ending with an underscore are considered private and should not be used.
• Spaces are used instead of tabs, and two-space indents are preferred.

Contexts

Contexts are implemented in ambuild2/frontend/base_gen.py. They are the entry point for using AMBuild. They have the following properties:

• compiler - An instance of a Compiler object, or None if DetectCompilers was never called. Calling DetectCompilers will set the compiler field for this and all future contexts.
• parent - The context that loaded the current context.
• script - The path, relative to sourcePath, of the current build script.
• sourcePath - The absolute path to the source tree.
• options - The result of evaluating command-line options from configure.py, via the optparse module.
• buildPath - The absolute path to the build folder.
• buildFolder - The working directory of jobs in this context, relative to buildPath.

Methods:

• SetBuildFolder(folder) - Sets the working directory of jobs in this context, relative to buildPath.
  • folder - A string representing the folder path. '.' and './' are allowed.
  • Returns None.
• DetectCompilers() - Detects C and C++ compilers and raises an exception if neither are available or they do not match. Should only be called once.
  • Returns a Compiler object that is also accessible via the compiler attribute.
• RunBuildScripts(files, vars={}) - Runs additional build scripts.
  • files - An iterable containing a list of file paths relative to path of the current build script, or a string containing such a path.
  • vars - An optional dictionary of global variables to set in each child build script. The dictionary is merged with global variables passed into our current script.
  • Returns None.