I think the reason make is both so controversial and also long-lived is that despite how everyone thinks of it, it isn't really a build tool. It actually doesn't know anything at all about how to build C, C++, or any other kind of code. (I know this is obvious to those of us that know make, but I often get the impression that a lot of people think of make as gradle or maven for C, which it really isn't.) It's really…
> It actually doesn't know anything at all about how to build C, C++, or any other kind of code. I guess it depends on how you define "know", but there are implicit rules. $ cat foo.c #include int main() { printf("Hello\n"); return 0; } $ cat Makefile foo: foo.c $ make cc -O2 -pipe foo.c -o foo $ ./foo Hello
Yeah. There is a metric crap-ton of the design of Make that is solely for the purpose of compiling and linking and document processing. That's actually part of what makes it annoying to use it for projects other than C or C++, when you don't need to compile or transform or depend on different formats.