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The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

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Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#81

Post by tachyoff »

IshKebab wrote: post #61
athenot wrote: post #6

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...

It's certainly better than the 200+ lines of JavaScript something like Webpack spits out when you statr a new project. I had to debug some of our project's build files and realized halfway through that my teammates didn't write this Webpack config monstrosity, Webpack generated it by /default/.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#82

Post by gjvc »

yoz-y wrote: post #57
jgh wrote: post #19

CMake is so nice compared to vanilla makefiles. I wonder if it can be used this way with Javascript.

cmake is good but it is quite heavily geared towards C/C++ development. I would love to have some modern makefile with a bit nicer syntax. Fitting into 80 columns is no longer a must.

In case you didn't know, the 80 column limitation has its origins here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#IBM_80-column_pun...

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#83

Post by simias »

rectang wrote: post #23

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…

Compared to the autotools I'd say make is fairly decent! But yeah, it's a mess. I wonder if it's really possible to improve significantly over the status quo if you're not willing to compromise on flexibility and design the build system alongside the language itself, like Rust does with cargo for instance.

Make on the other hand is completely language agnostic, you can use it to compile C, Java, LaTeX, or make your taxes. Make is a bit like shell scripts, it's great when you have a small project and you just want to build a few C files for instance[1] but when it starts growing there always comes a point where it becomes hell.

[1] And even then if you want to do it right you need compiler support to figure header dependencies out, like GCC's various -M flags.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#84

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

bsenftner wrote: post #76

A long time ago, in a developer's paradise called the 1970's there was an automated build tool called "make". It had this and only this syntax: If a line begins at character 0, that is a list of files whose timestamps should be checked, if any are 'old', then execute the series of command lines beneath, identifying them as starting with a tab character. That was it, the entire syntax of "make", and it was complete. T…

I did not use Make at this time (I wasn't alive!), but it seems that you'd have to declare dependencies too. How did you determine if it was "old"?

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#85

Post by isaachier »

jschwartzi wrote: post #77
isaachier wrote: post #35

I started my career with C++ development and never used a direct makefile in any of my projects. When I write C/C++, I use CMake. My current job has me programming in Go where people seem to love makefiles, but I consistently find bugs in the implementation (usually has too many phony targets, etc.), Why don't people use makefile generators outside of the C/C++ community?

I don't use CMake for embedded systems because the syntax and options are even more obtuse for what I need to do with it. When I get down to it, every make-based build system I've ever used boils down to using the macro language to generate all the targets, and then building your output board image by dependencies. But it's the details of how to do this that vary widely depending on your application for the board. CM…

I'd need to know more about the details to answer completely. I think CMake does have a complicated syntax, yet I think it is worth the nuisance in most cases. Many tools can use CMake's compilation database for configuration, such as clang-format and clang-tidy.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#86

Post by simias »

jofer wrote: post #58
rectang wrote: post #23

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…

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I've always found its syntax to be quite nice (though admittedly a departure from most modern languages). Then again, I find using JSON or not-quite-ruby to configure a build incredibly bizarre and confusing, so I guess I'm just set in my ways... In all seriousness, what's wrong with it? Significant tabs aren't great, but I feel like that's a relatively minor wart. The simple things are…

I've been writing Makefiles regularly for maybe 15 years and I always end up on this page every time I need to write a new one: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Automatic...

$ $* $^ ... Not particularly explicit. You also have the very useful substitution rules, like $(SRC:.c=.o) which are probably more arcane than they ought to be. You can make similar complaints about POSIX shell syntax but at least the shell has the excuse of being used interactively so it makes sense to save on the typing I suppose.

That's my major qualm with it however, the rest of the syntax is mostly straightforward in my opinion, at least for basic Makefiles.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#87

Post by mturmon »

jofer wrote: post #58
rectang wrote: post #23

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…

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I've always found its syntax to be quite nice (though admittedly a departure from most modern languages). Then again, I find using JSON or not-quite-ruby to configure a build incredibly bizarre and confusing, so I guess I'm just set in my ways... In all seriousness, what's wrong with it? Significant tabs aren't great, but I feel like that's a relatively minor wart. The simple things are…

I don't like the syntax much, but I love the programming model. I think people who are used to imperative languages are put off by the declarative programming model of make.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#88

Post by Myrmornis »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #28
rectang wrote: post #23

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?

Do you honestly think Make has no advantages over conventional scripting languages when it comes to building software? I suspect you know that it’s designed for that task and has been used for that task for several decades. Presumably you respect the community over those decades sufficiently to have a strong prior belief that there are good arguments for Make (as well as downsides), even if you can’t be bothered to research them.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#89

Post by jlg23 »

rectang wrote: post #23

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's interface is horrible. Significant tabs.

True, one should not edit makefiles with notepad. Proper editors have support for editing them, though.

> Syntax which relies on bizarre punctuation...

Well documented, though.[1]

> a different dependency-based-programming build tool could replace it... but that's just wishful thinking

Use prolog[2], you should be able to write this in about 42 lines. But you'll end up with the same complaints ("the syntax, the magic variables!") because, in my experience, those are just superficial: The real problem, imho, is that declarative and rule based programming are simply not part of the curriculum, especially not for auto-didactic web developers. OTOH, it only takes an hour or two to grok it, when somebody "who knows" is around and explains. It really is dead simple.

[1] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/mak...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#90

Post by jstimpfle »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #71
jrimbault wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They must have got something good though. Else why would there entire families of C-like languages ? Network effect. If you wanted to write for unix, you almost had to use C originally. > Plus, to me C syntax is particularly good. It's meh. It's not the most straightforward when defining complex types like arrays or function pointers. > You're writing real words and the computers does the things you tell it to. To…

Everybody I know found it confusing at first, but its logical, and modular. I don't know a language with a better type declaration syntax. It gets impractical when you define function that return functions that return... because these expression grow on the left and right simultaneously. But realistically, you don't do that in C, and other than that, I find it easy to read the type of any expression...

    const int *x[5];
    *x[3];  // const int
    x[3];  // const int *
    x;   // ok - there is first a decay of x[5] to *x, so: const int **
Is there any other syntax that has this modularity?
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