You might use some pre-processor to generate boilerplate code during development.
Note: pre-processors can be classified as two categories:
- System-dependent, which should be delayed until running on user machines.
- System-independent: lex, yacc, m4, re2c, etc, which can be executed any time.
BS has built-in support for conditional compilation, which satisfies the first point. This section is about the second point.
An example, where bsb uses ocamlyacc:
{
"generators": [
{
"name": "ocamlyacc",
"command": "ocamlyacc $in"
}
],
"sources": {
"dir": "src",
"generators": [
{
"name": "ocamlyacc",
"edge": ["test.ml", "test.mli", ":", "test.mly"]
}
]
}
}ocamlyacc will generate the artifacts test.ml and test.mli in the same directory than test.mly.
Note: we highly recommend you to check in the generated files, since this cuts out dependencies like ocamlyacc for the end-users.
When developing a project, bsb will track the dependencies between test.ml and test.mly properly. When released as a package, bsb will cut such dependency, so that users will only need the generated test.ml. To help test such behavior in development mode, users could set it manually:
{
"cut-generators": true
}This prevents bsb from regenerating test.ml whenever test.mly changes.