What is Boost Jam and is Jam worth migrating to?

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cbrulak picture cbrulak · Feb 4, 2009 · Viewed 8.6k times · Source

What is Boost Jam and is Jam worth migrating to?

I understand that jam is build system built by perforce however I am not sure how the boost jam & regular jam is different.

I'm also hoping there could be someone in the SO community who has worked with it and maybe can highlight some differences and/or benefits.

Answer

Trevor Robinson picture Trevor Robinson · Sep 25, 2009

I use Boost Jam for my cross-platform C++ development. I chose it because

  • I want my code to build everywhere Boost builds,
  • it uses a relatively simple declarative language to specify how to build targets, and
  • it can build all the different flavors of your binaries (e.g. debug vs. release, 32-bit vs. 64-bit, msvc vs. gcc) in a single invocation with an absolute minimum of flavor-related exceptions in the build declarations.

You can refine generic rules with flavor-specific settings, rather than writing separate rules for each flavor permutation. The syntax isn't exactly what I would have chosen, but it's not too hard to get used to.

This paper compares Boost Jam to CMake, SCons, and Eclipse CDT: http://syrcose.ispras.ru/2009/files/04_paper.pdf

My understanding is that Boost Jam is an offshoot of Perforce Jam maintained by the Boost community, and that Perforce Jam isn't actively maintained anymore (the release notes have the last update in April 2003).

Of course, if you don't care about cross-platform development, there are easier ways to go, as others have mentioned here. Personally, I keep meaning to revisit Eclipse CDT; it didn't seem usable 5 years ago, but I hear it has come a long way.

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