You are the manager of a software project. Your users are asking you for a Visual Studio workspace file, but you don’t have Visual Studio! Or perhaps you are a Windows developer struggling to keep Makefiles in sync for a Linux port. It’s a common problem for open source projects: restrict your users to a single build tool — driving away potential contributors — or manually maintain two, three, or more sets of build scripts. Enter Premake.

Premake is a build script generator. Describe your project using the full-featured Lua scripting language and then let Premake create the input files for:

• MS Visual Studio 6, 2002, 2003, or 2005
• GNU make (including Cygwin and MinGW)
• IC#Code SharpDevelop
• MonoDevelop
• …more on the way!

Premake allows you to manage your project configuration in one place and still support those pesky IDE-addicted Windows coders and/or cranky Linux command-line junkies. It allows you to generate project files for tools that you do not own. It saves the time that would otherwise be spent manually keeping several different toolsets in sync. And it provides an easy upgrade path as new versions of your favorite tools are released.

Premake is a “plain old C” application, distributed as a single executable file. It does not require any additional libraries to be installed, and should build and run pretty much anywhere. It uses a handful of platform dependent routines (directory management, mostly) which are isolated in a single file. Adding support for additional toolsets and languages is straightforward. The source code is available under the GPL, and the project is hosted at SourceForge.