Best Practice for Invoking Generator

[lenianiva]

What is the best practice for re-generating the LibPlaceholder.jl file in the build script (e.g. deps/build.jl)?

Currently, I am using a Makefile at the root of the project, structured like so:

gen/lean/LibPlaceholder.jl: gen/generator.jl gen/generator.toml gen/Manifest.toml gen/prologue.jl
	cd gen; \
		julia --project -e 'import Pkg; Pkg.instantiate()'; \
		julia --project generator.jl

all: gen/lean/LibPlaceholder.jl

and every time there is an update to generator.{toml,jl} I would need to manually re-run this script. Is there an idiomatic way to trigger this subproject rebuild process in deps/build.jl?

[JamesWrigley]

Most developers only generate the bindings once and then bundle them with the package, generating them in the packages build step would add an unnecessary dependency on Clang.jl and require that everyone installing the package generate the bindings (which should be unnecessary).

My preferred workflow is to keep a Julia REPL open with the generator project activated, and then run include("generator.jl") in the REPL whenever I make changes. That amortizes the overhead of starting Julia, making sure the project is instantiated, JIT compilation, etc.