Can I create additional axes/dimensions in Premake?

Question

Premake 5 gives you two functions to separate independent configuration variables in your projects: configurations and platforms. So for example, you might have:

configurations { "Debug", "Release" }
platform { "Windows", "Linux" }

The documentation refers to these as axes, which is a good way to describe them, since you can have independent settings for each axis:

Really, platforms are just another set of build configuration names, providing another axis on which to configure your project.

But what if I want another axis? For example, the data types used for particular calculations:

calctypes { "Long", "Default", "Short" }

Can I create this new axis, and if so, how?

Answer 1

I think tags (a new feature due to be released in the next alpha build) might be what you're looking for. Here is an example from the pull request where they were implemented:

workspace 'foobar'
    configurations { 'release-std', 'debug-std', 'release-blz', 'debug-blz' }

   filter { 'configuration:*-std' }
        tags { 'use-std' }
   filter { 'configuration:*-blz' }
        tags { 'use-blz' }

   project 'test'
        filter { 'tags:use-blz' }
            includedependencies { 'blz' }
            defines { 'USE_BLZ' }

        filter { 'tags:use-std' }
            defines { 'USE_STD' }

Update: If you would like to see how to add custom fields (e.g. defines, configurations, etc.), have a look at the api.register() calls in _premake_init.lua. To see how to enable filtering on one of these fields, have a look at this pull request.

While adding new fields is trivial and can be done anywhere, we need to do some work before it will be as simple to enable those fields for filtering.