C++ module tooling emulator playground

Developing tooling for C++ modules is challenging to say the least. Module implementation maturity in compilers varies, they all work slightly (well massively) differently, there are bugs and you also need a code base that uses modules. Because of these and other reasons there are maybe five people in the entire world who even think about this issue. This is bad, because it is supposed to be future foundational technology. It would benefit from more eyes.

Something ought to be done about this. So I did.

I created a fake "module only" C++ compiler, a fake linker, a fake module scanner and fake project generator. The compiler does not produce any code. It only does three things:

1. Reads export statements from sources and writes corresponding fake module files
2. Reads import statements from source files.
3. Validates that all module files a source file imports exist on disk at the time of invocation

This did not take much effort. In fact the whole project is approximately 300 lines of Python and can be obtained from this repository.

With this it is possible for anyone interested to try to come up with a module building scheme that does not require generating O(N²) command line arguments on the fly. The current scanner implementation is taken almost directly from Meson and it works one build target at a time as opposed to a single source file at a time. With this approach the overhead of scanning is one process invocation per build target. A per-source approach would take two processes per source scanning: one for invoking the compiler to generate the standard JSON-format dependency file and another for converting that to the dyndep format that Ninja understands.

The setup assumes that the compiler supports a "write module files to this directory" command line argument. It is mandatory to avoid generating compiler arguments dynamically.

Or maybe it isn't and there is a way to make it work in some other way. At least now the tooling is available so anyone reading this can try to solve this problem.