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Why Use Make

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Re: Why Use Make

#41

Post by craftkiller »

lmm wrote: post #37
falcolas wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of "Don't do this" without suggesting alternatives doesn't do anyone much good. If you're on a *nix system, building C/C++ programs (or automating one-off builds like the example), what would you recommend in make's place?

CMake

Personally I'd suggest Premake because it uses Lua instead of rolling its own scripting language. The world would be a better place if we could all agree on one scripting language for stuff like this so no one has to look up the syntax for things like creating arrays for every individual tool.

Feature-wise premake isn't entirely caught up to CMake but it has everything important. Also the premake files look a lot cleaner and more readable compared to cmake files.

Re: Why Use Make

#42

Post by jgrahamc »

Three years ago I wrote a blog post arguing in favour of Make : http://blog.jgc.org/2010/11/things-make-got-right-and-how-to...

I'm not sure I still agree with everything in that post, but Make is very terse and expressive which I like.

One of the biggest problems with Make is that it's a macro language and some people don't get along well with them.

Re: Why Use Make

#43

Post by leif »

craftkiller wrote: post #41
lmm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CMake

Personally I'd suggest Premake because it uses Lua instead of rolling its own scripting language. The world would be a better place if we could all agree on one scripting language for stuff like this so no one has to look up the syntax for things like creating arrays for every individual tool. Feature-wise premake isn't entirely caught up to CMake but it has everything important. Also the premake files look a lot cle…

http://xkcd.com/927

Re: Why Use Make

#44

Post by mseebach »

niggler wrote: post #39
mseebach wrote: post #26

Absolutely do not use make for any new project. If you love make, it's a big, red, burning flag that you're not demanding enough of your tools and that you're not keeping up with changes in your ecosystem. There are many, many way better alternatives to make. Which one is better depends on the platform you're on. The majority of them throws in automatic dependency management for free. Yes, I know that the essence of…

"There are many, many way better alternatives to make" Can you give an example with the ubiquity of make and better expressiveness?

No, probably not. But I think the metrics you've chosen are irrelevant. Make was not only the best, it was the only player in the game until quite recently, so of course it's ubiquitous. As for expressiveness, yes, it certainly is expressive. It's also very hard to learn and very difficult to maintain. But build systems such as Gradle or SBT, are also incredibly expressive, by virtue of being configurable in actual programming languages - with the added benefit of not having to learn a new language.

Re: Why Use Make

#45

Post by swift »

lmm wrote: post #37
falcolas wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of "Don't do this" without suggesting alternatives doesn't do anyone much good. If you're on a *nix system, building C/C++ programs (or automating one-off builds like the example), what would you recommend in make's place?

CMake

CMake is pretty ugly in its own right, though I will grant it's hard to be worse than GNU make.

Re: Why Use Make

#46

Post by mseebach »

falcolas wrote: post #35
mseebach wrote: post #26

Absolutely do not use make for any new project. If you love make, it's a big, red, burning flag that you're not demanding enough of your tools and that you're not keeping up with changes in your ecosystem. There are many, many way better alternatives to make. Which one is better depends on the platform you're on. The majority of them throws in automatic dependency management for free. Yes, I know that the essence of…

Lots of "Don't do this" without suggesting alternatives doesn't do anyone much good. If you're on a *nix system, building C/C++ programs (or automating one-off builds like the example), what would you recommend in make's place?

I debated whether to start namedropping build systems, but I decided it was going to be counter productive and devolve into a debate of the relative merits of the systems I'd picked out. In the end it depends heavily on the environment you're in what makes sense for your project.

Re: Why Use Make

#47

Post by jahewson »

lmm wrote: post #37
falcolas wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of "Don't do this" without suggesting alternatives doesn't do anyone much good. If you're on a *nix system, building C/C++ programs (or automating one-off builds like the example), what would you recommend in make's place?

CMake

CMake is an abomination

Re: Why Use Make

#48

Post by mseebach »

w3pm wrote: post #40
mseebach wrote: post #26

Absolutely do not use make for any new project. If you love make, it's a big, red, burning flag that you're not demanding enough of your tools and that you're not keeping up with changes in your ecosystem. There are many, many way better alternatives to make. Which one is better depends on the platform you're on. The majority of them throws in automatic dependency management for free. Yes, I know that the essence of…

Use the best tool for the job. Your advice is probably correct for whichever apps you've written in the past, but it's definitely not correct in the general case. Appropriate tools are highly dependent on what you're building. In my area of experience make has been more than adequate (crossplatform games and Erlang servers with rebar + make). Yes the syntax is arcane and ugly but it does a fine job.

While my advice might not be directly applicable in the general sense, I maintain that the headline advice of the article is wrong in the general sense.

Also, I quite specifically didn't claim that make is never the right choice.

Re: Why Use Make

#49

Post by jpollock »

Everyone points at make and says, "use something better". They point at Rake, they point at Maven. However, Make has one feature that I really need, that I rely on to speed up builds: parallel dependency construction.

The last time I checked, neither Maven nor Rake do this properly. Maven runs everything inside a single VM. Who wants to have to worry about multithreading in their unit tests? Rake requires thread support in the underlying Ruby interpreter (why?).

I've got 64+ hardware threads (Sparc T4-1) all sitting there waiting to be spun up and do my bidding. Please help me to convert electricity to heat!

Re: Why Use Make

#50

Post by gatherknwldg »

mseebach wrote: post #26

Absolutely do not use make for any new project. If you love make, it's a big, red, burning flag that you're not demanding enough of your tools and that you're not keeping up with changes in your ecosystem. There are many, many way better alternatives to make. Which one is better depends on the platform you're on. The majority of them throws in automatic dependency management for free. Yes, I know that the essence of…

"Which one is better depends on the platform you're on"

That works against a portable build. That still matters to some of us.

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