The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make • Hacker News Board

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#21

Post by mysteriousllama » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 1:21 AM UTC

forrestthewoods wrote: post #19

God I hate make. I hate make so very, very much. Compiling code isn't that hard. I swear to the programming lords on high it isn't. Here's a wonderfully useful open source project - Google gperftools [1]. It includes TCMalloc amongst other things. The Makefile.in is 6390 lines long. Configure is 20,767 lines long. Libtool is 10247 lines long. That's fucking insane. Compiling OpenSource is such a pain in the ass. Part…

What you are describing is autoconf, not make. Make by itself is actually a very handy tool for performing tasks that have a dependency graph.

Autoconf.. Well, I can't disagree. It's a hack built on top of a hack and should probably be rethought. Once autoconf is done generating Makefiles, make itself is generally trouble-free.

http://freecode.com/articles/stop-the-autoconf-insanity-why-...

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#22

Post by voltagex_ » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 1:23 AM UTC

forrestthewoods wrote: post #19

God I hate make. I hate make so very, very much. Compiling code isn't that hard. I swear to the programming lords on high it isn't. Here's a wonderfully useful open source project - Google gperftools [1]. It includes TCMalloc amongst other things. The Makefile.in is 6390 lines long. Configure is 20,767 lines long. Libtool is 10247 lines long. That's fucking insane. Compiling OpenSource is such a pain in the ass. Part…

Count me in as a Makefile hater. I'm even using it to manage a portable /home directory and it's just making me hate it even more. Why did all the alternatives have to fail or be worse than Make?

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#23

Post by kchoudhu » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 1:25 AM UTC

sdesol wrote: post #7

sigvef wrote: post #2

Although make does have a lot of weird quirks, its winning strength is that it is installed virtually everywhere.

The problem that I've found when I was trying to port my installer to FreeBSD was their make doesn't like GNU Makefiles. Not sure when they diverged from one another so having Make everywhere, doesn't necessary mean your Makefile will work everywhere. I liked how security centric FreeBSD was but they seem to be anti-enterprise friendly. The process to install Oracle Java was painful and EnterpriseDB didn't even bothe…

A cursory google search should have shown that gmake (GNU Make) is widely available and used on FreeBSD.

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#24

Post by badman_ting » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 1:26 AM UTC

mathrawka wrote: post #16

badman_ting wrote: post #13

I have seen this idea floating around… personally I would rather write JS than learn another weird file format that I will have to Google every single time I mess with the Makefile, but the idea is decent.

When you are learning that new JS framework, do you not keep going through their docs and googling? I would say the documentation and google results for a decade old tool would be more available when you try to do something a bit complex.

> When you are learning that new JS framework, do you not keep going through their docs and googling?

Yes -- and then I proceed to use the thing every day. I wouldn't be adjusting a Makefile very often so I would keep forgetting whatever I "learned" every time I changed it.

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#25

Post by hhm » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 1:26 AM UTC

For my own projects, I have found make's alternatives (eg. scons) to be a much superior choice. Make is just too complex for what it is intended to do (at least as used with autoconf, etc.).

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#26

Post by badman_ting » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 1:27 AM UTC

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #20

forrestthewoods wrote: post #19

God I hate make. I hate make so very, very much. Compiling code isn't that hard. I swear to the programming lords on high it isn't. Here's a wonderfully useful open source project - Google gperftools [1]. It includes TCMalloc amongst other things. The Makefile.in is 6390 lines long. Configure is 20,767 lines long. Libtool is 10247 lines long. That's fucking insane. Compiling OpenSource is such a pain in the ass. Part…

And yet most contemporary hipster build systems are all just shiny make reinventions.

Good enough for me.

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#27

Post by crussmann » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 1:27 AM UTC

For simple builds with dependencies, I find makefiles hard to beat. The only thing that has me pulling out my hair every time is the whole tabs vs. spaces thing, especially when on a machine that I haven't pulled in my .vimrc yet.

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#28

Post by matt__rose » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 1:28 AM UTC

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #20

forrestthewoods wrote: post #19

God I hate make. I hate make so very, very much. Compiling code isn't that hard. I swear to the programming lords on high it isn't. Here's a wonderfully useful open source project - Google gperftools [1]. It includes TCMalloc amongst other things. The Makefile.in is 6390 lines long. Configure is 20,767 lines long. Libtool is 10247 lines long. That's fucking insane. Compiling OpenSource is such a pain in the ass. Part…

And yet most contemporary hipster build systems are all just shiny make reinventions.

Actually, most contemporary hipster build systems are bad reimplementations of make. Yes, make is a PITA, but every other build system is worse.

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#29

Post by mathrawka » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 1:35 AM UTC

badman_ting wrote: post #24

mathrawka wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are learning that new JS framework, do you not keep going through their docs and googling? I would say the documentation and google results for a decade old tool would be more available when you try to do something a bit complex.

> When you are learning that new JS framework, do you not keep going through their docs and googling? Yes -- and then I proceed to use the thing every day. I wouldn't be adjusting a Makefile very often so I would keep forgetting whatever I "learned" every time I changed it.

Let's say the JS framework is Grunt.

If you are using Grunt everyday, doesn't that mean you are modifying it? Then you would be in the same exact place as with a Makefile.

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#30

Post by DSMan195276 » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 1:41 AM UTC

forrestthewoods wrote: post #19

God I hate make. I hate make so very, very much. Compiling code isn't that hard. I swear to the programming lords on high it isn't. Here's a wonderfully useful open source project - Google gperftools [1]. It includes TCMalloc amongst other things. The Makefile.in is 6390 lines long. Configure is 20,767 lines long. Libtool is 10247 lines long. That's fucking insane. Compiling OpenSource is such a pain in the ass. Part…

That's a GNU autotools setup, not a pure Makefile setup. A simple Makefile setup is much much easier. A current C project I'm working on has around 150 lines worth of Makefile stuff, and that includes both compiling source, running flex over lexer files, an option for creating a .tar.gz of the current source, and also an option to run tests on the compiled object files. It's also dead simple to maintain (The only time it requires a direct update is when adding test cases, and that's because you have to specify which source .c files to test).

Now to be fair, I am sacrificing some options here. The biggest is that autotools runs tests on the installation environment and tests the available functions and standards compliance, which in theory allows compiling the source on any system with has autotools for it, which is why it's so huge. You can't do that with standard Makefiles. I just stick close to the standard and avoid any non-standard extensions that I don't need.