Release/debug builds in SCons

SCons doesn’t have baked-in support for release/debug build so there is more ways to do it. I’ve found the one based on command line options (e.g. --release-build) usefull and easy to implement. It is based on AddOption() function with the same use case and notation as standard ArgumentParser.add_argument() from argparse library.

To define --release-build commandline argument option all we needto do is call AddOption() this way

AddOption('--release-build', action='store_true', dest='release_build', 
	help='generate optimized binary', default=False)

at the beginning of the SConstruct file and then based on commandline options modify the build environment the right way

env = Environment(CCFLAGS=['-Wall'])

# apply debug/release options
if not GetOption('release_build'):
	env.Append(CCFLAGS=['-g', '-Og', '-DDEBUG'])
else: # --release-build
	env.Append(CCFLAGS=['-Os'])

Whole SConstruct should looks like

# SConstruct: use scons --release-build in case optimized binery required

AddOption('--release-build', action='store_true', dest='release_build', 
	help='generate optimized binary', default=False)

env = Environment(CCFLAGS=['-Wall'])

# apply debug/release options
if not GetOption('release_build'):
	env.Append(CCFLAGS=['-g', '-Og', '-DDEBUG'])
else: # --release-build
	env.Append(CCFLAGS=['-Os'])

env.Program('main.cpp')

and test program main.cpp can be simpliest hello world like

#include <iostream>

int main(int argc, char * argv[]) {
	std::cout << "hello!\n";
	return 0;
}

With scons --release-build command we can produce optimized binary and with scons we can produce unoptimized binary with debug symbols.

And that is pretty much all for today!