61–70 of 525 posts
After going through a few build systems for Javascript, I realized they were all reinventing the wheel in one way or the other, and pulled out venerable Make from the closet. It turned out to be way more expressive and easy to read. One target to build (prod), another to run with fsevents doing auto-rebuild when a file is saved (instant gratification during dev), then a few targets for cleaup & housekeeping. All said…
Tangential, but I cringe everytime I see the word "transpiler". A compiler is a compiler is a compiler. Previous discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15154994
I believe $< is only the first dependency and $^ is all of them
Make's interface is horrible. Significant tabs. Syntax which relies on bizarre punctuation... If only whoever authored Make 40 years ago had had the design acumen of a Ken Thompson or a Dennis Ritchie! We're stuck with Make because of network effects. I wish that it could just become "lost" forever and a different dependency-based-programming build tool could replace it... but that's just wishful thinking. The pace o…
Make is such a horrifically awful thing to work with that I just end up using a regular scripting language for building. Why learn another language with all its eccentricities and footguns when I already know several others?
After going through a few build systems for Javascript, I realized they were all reinventing the wheel in one way or the other, and pulled out venerable Make from the closet. It turned out to be way more expressive and easy to read. One target to build (prod), another to run with fsevents doing auto-rebuild when a file is saved (instant gratification during dev), then a few targets for cleaup & housekeeping. All said…
Wow if you consider Makefiles easy to read...
After going through a few build systems for Javascript, I realized they were all reinventing the wheel in one way or the other, and pulled out venerable Make from the closet. It turned out to be way more expressive and easy to read. One target to build (prod), another to run with fsevents doing auto-rebuild when a file is saved (instant gratification during dev), then a few targets for cleaup & housekeeping. All said…
Wow if you consider Makefiles easy to read...
task: dependency
list of
commands
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I think of transpilation as a subset of compilation. So a transpiler is also a compiler, and a compiler that has a readable language backend can do transpilation, which is a type of compilation.
u/masklinn still asks a good question though: there are tools that act on the source code for both "compilation" and "transpilation" (eg Kotlin), depending on the target platform. They do not distinguish, why should we?
What about assemblers or disassemblers? Given a suitably broad definition of compiler that includes transpilers, are they not also included? Wouldn't the same arguments apply?
Make's interface is horrible. Significant tabs. Syntax which relies on bizarre punctuation... If only whoever authored Make 40 years ago had had the design acumen of a Ken Thompson or a Dennis Ritchie! We're stuck with Make because of network effects. I wish that it could just become "lost" forever and a different dependency-based-programming build tool could replace it... but that's just wishful thinking. The pace o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make is such a horrifically awful thing to work with that I just end up using a regular scripting language for building. Why learn another language with all its eccentricities and footguns when I already know several others?
This is why I like redo; it handles all of the dependency stuff for you, but your build scripts are written in pure sh
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not like C is famous for having particularly good syntax. If anything, it's the worst thing about it.
They must have got something good though. Else why would there entire families of C-like languages ? Plus, to me C syntax is particularly good. You're writing real words and the computers does the things you tell it to. To the letter.