It seems to be a meta build system, written in Rust built from cargo. It has an interesting feature list that looks like it could simplify Beman project workflows if it proves to be useful and popular for our community.
If someone wants to reach out, Chase Sunstrom might be someone to invite into the Beman Project. I think that’s his real name, but it also sounds like the name of a swashbuckling space pirate, so I can’t be sure.
I’m convinced that a project in this space is overdue in the C++ ecosystem, and is needed by Beman projects in particular.
Looking at the example for the cforge.toml, there are some things I like (dependencies specific to vpkg, system libraries, Conan, and git) and some I think might need some more thought (specifying a C++ standard and a build_dir). But it seems like a small project, so assuming Chase is collaborative, overall design might be open for discussion.
I found some time to see what’s possible in CForge and the project looks very promising. It is still in Beta though and definitely not in a production ready state. However, I think that a collaboration would be a nice opportunity for this project to evolve with some real project requirements, and probably some nice contributions from the Beman members. Also, “outsourcing” those types of problems to CForge would give more room to our members to get involved with for the actual libraries. I would love to see it’s creator present this build system and being invited to the Beman Project.