Create tools/build.py. Automate building C++ libs and subprocess and make it cross-platform. Windows platform already supported.

[cztomczak]

Currently on Windows when building the cefpython module you first need to build the C++ libraries and the subprocess executable by building vcproj files separately. It's a manual process that needs to be automated. On Linux/Mac it's better, the compile.py script will build the C++ libs and the subprocess executable automatically by running Makefile. However when making changes, these changes need to be done separately for Windows and for Mac/Linux. A cross-platform solution for building these libs/subprocess would be nice.

Solution 1: Cmake and Ninja

CMake - https://cmake.org/
Ninja - https://ninja-build.org/

• Refactor the client_handler/ and subprocess/ directories and put all .cpp/.h files to app/ directory.
• Get rid of all the vcproj files on Windows:
  • client_handler_py27_32bit.vcproj
  • libcefpythonapp_py27_32bit.vcproj
  • subprocess_32bit.vcproj

Solution 2: setuptools

Looks like there may be an alternative to cmake/ninja. Turns out setuptools can not only build python modules, but also static libraries and executables. Search in Google for "setuptools + xxx" where xxx is:

• StaticLib class
• StaticLibrary class
• Executable class
• "libraries" keyword
• build_clib

Does setuptools have some kind of cache mechanism? So that it doesn't rebuild every time when there are no changes in sources?

• Looks like yes, force rebuilding pass --force flag to setup.py

Cmake seems complicated, things aren't easier than Makefiles, just provides cross-platform support. Using setuptools may be easier, it already takes care of detecting which VC++ compiler to use depending on Python version used. However distutils/setuptools documentation is very poor. I couldn't find any references to "StaticLib" and "Executable" classes referenced above. Some links:

• setuptools repo: https://github.com/pypa/setuptools
• setuptools docs: https://setuptools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/setuptools.html
• distutils docs: https://docs.python.org/2/distutils/apiref.html (setuptools should support all features that distutils provides I think)

[cztomczak]

tools/build.py was already created. Building C++ projects is automated, however when new c++ files are added then manual modifications are required in makefiles on Mac/Linux and in .vcproj files on Windows.

On Windows only Python 2.7 32-bit is currently supported and to support other platforms / python versions new .vcproj files need to be created. This still needs to be automated. To use a .vcproj template file and generate actual .vcproj files on the fly for given python/platform.

Using setuptools would be cool, but this would require testing on all platforms.

[cztomczak]

Commit 5f24f50 added tools/build_cpp_projects.py which builds C++ projects on Windows using distutils/setuptools compiler. This allowed to support Python 3. In VS2010 vcbuild.exe was replaced by msbuild.exe. Ufortunately WinSDK 7.1 does not come with msbuild.exe, so it would be required to install Visual Studio 2010, and to support both 32-bit ad 64-bit compilations a non-express version would have to be installed, which is not free. So to make it free open-source it was required migrate to a new compilation system that uses distutils/setuptools packages.

On Linux/Mac C++ projects are still built using Makefiles.