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The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

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Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#31
I couldn't agree more here. After reading the source code on the twitter css bootstrap makefile a few years ago I got inspired and wrote my own rewrite of what they had... I was blown away by the gains at it gave me. Of note I bound make to cmd+b in Sublime Text, and I just compile when I see fit.

I've now tweaked my make files so they are almost unrecognisable from the twitter ones, it can run PHP, JS unit tests, fires up phantomJS and tests individual modules, can release minified for production, or not for debugging purposes. I can't stress how useful it is being able to just add a line and you get such powerful support.

I haven't had time to add git hooks yet, but thats the next stage, I plan to set the hooks to run tests and clamp down on poor quality code (I work with interns quite often... sometimes I cry for just average quality code coming in).

For a story of the production gains I've had. I moved the whole company CSS into a CSS preprocessor and cleaned up all the existing structures to fit the make file release procedure. It came back a thousand fold away a rebranding and I had everything done in two days. I was blown away with that alone, I've been involved in so many rebrands over the years that go on for months... not hours.

Do it, if you're bit unsure where to start check the twitter bootstrap build file and muck around with what they have done.

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#33
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes it is available and I guess I sort of boxed myself in when I said not available. It's not available as a default install ... at least not on the FreeBSD 10 install disk I used.

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#35
You can't write a blog article about make while comparing it to a bunch of Node.js build tools and not mention the word Windows once. Make is good for you because you're not an open-source project built on a cross-platform development platform. All of your employees use Macs and your servers are Linux. For OS Node projects make is simply out of the question because it is janky on Windows and every makefile ever written is full of bashisms.

Next.

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#36
post #35

You can't write a blog article about make while comparing it to a bunch of Node.js build tools and not mention the word Windows once. Make is good for you because you're not an open-source project built on a cross-platform development platform. All of your employees use Macs and your servers are Linux. For OS Node projects make is simply out of the question because it is janky on Windows and every makefile ever writt…

Certainly you can. In fact, the OP did exactly that and his article is at the top of HN.

My hope is that we can just carry on with our dev work and Windows will slowly fade away as a platform for developing anything but SharePoint intranets...

[Note: I don't have a neckbeard, but I do run Debian testing.]

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#37

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.

Reinventions that are cross-platform (this actually matters).

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#38
post #35

You can't write a blog article about make while comparing it to a bunch of Node.js build tools and not mention the word Windows once. Make is good for you because you're not an open-source project built on a cross-platform development platform. All of your employees use Macs and your servers are Linux. For OS Node projects make is simply out of the question because it is janky on Windows and every makefile ever writt…

Certainly you can. In fact, the OP did exactly that and his article is at the top of HN. My hope is that we can just carry on with our dev work and Windows will slowly fade away as a platform for developing anything but SharePoint intranets... [Note: I don't have a neckbeard, but I do run Debian testing.]

But... but... some of us our doing our development on Windows and loathe Sharepoint.

Re: The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make

#40
post #31

I couldn't agree more here. After reading the source code on the twitter css bootstrap makefile a few years ago I got inspired and wrote my own rewrite of what they had... I was blown away by the gains at it gave me. Of note I bound make to cmd+b in Sublime Text, and I just compile when I see fit. I've now tweaked my make files so they are almost unrecognisable from the twitter ones, it can run PHP, JS unit tests, fi…

They've used Grunt for builds for a while now[0].

It seems most of the twitter-style web developer community who happily replaced `make` with `rake` when developing for Rails simply followed that with `grunt` when they moved to JavaScript.

[0]: https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/commit/0d33455ef486d0cf06c...

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