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Build Tools – Make, no more

hadihariri.com

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Re: Build Tools – Make, no more

#31

Post by MarkPNeyer »

SchizoDuckie wrote: post #12

So he's saying use 'make' instead of gulp/grunt and then he submits an example where it's as easy as piping through GCC. He's making the wrong assumption that you don't need to setup a build environment when building with make, but to have gcc you will still also need to install g++ and build-tools. Also, he refers to building on Windows using yet another specialist tool, but have you recently tried building anything…

> this stuff took 2 years to evolve and a lot of people went through hours of frustration

GMake was first released in 1977: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_(software)

They've worked on this thing for decades

There are 42,000 issues filed for make. if you could resolve each of these issues in 10 minutes, you'd spend 291 days of frustration. http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=make

kids these days.

Re: Build Tools – Make, no more

#32

Post by JoshTriplett »

gyepi wrote: post #25

1. Since make has builtin suffix rules, the Makefile could be simplified to: CXX=g++ hello: main.o factorial.o hello.o clean: rm -rf *o hello 2. Shameless plug: he didn't mention redo [1], which is simpler than make and more reliable. The comparable redo scripts to the Makefile would be: cat @all.do redo hello EOF cat hello.do o='main.o factorial.o hello.o' redo-ifchange $o g++ $o -o $3 EOF cat default.o.do redo-ifch…

CXX=g++ isn't necessary either; make already knows about $(CXX) and how to link C++ programs. Also, I think you wanted .o, not o.

And compared to that Makefile, the redo scripts you list don't seem simpler at all. I've seen reasonably compelling arguments for redo, but that wasn't one.

Re: Build Tools – Make, no more

#34

Post by revscat »

eponeponepon wrote: post #4

I'm unreasonably fond of Ant - there's plenty of scope for pointless clever-dickery, and there are days where that's all that keeps me going! Nice to see it mentioned in a context other than "oh god what a mess"... even though, in fairness, many aspects of it are a complete dog's dinner.

Ant is a Turing-complete language in XML.

That is horrifying.

It is bloated, difficult to read, tends towards duplication. It also doesn't do dependency management all that well, doesn't cache build results (so it does a complete rebuild every time), and is difficult to extend.

Not an Ant fan. I have used both Rake and Gradle successfully, and have been much happier with each. Their scripts tend to be (much) more compact, easier to read, and less prone to duplication.

Re: Build Tools – Make, no more

#35

Post by dap »

SchizoDuckie wrote: post #12

So he's saying use 'make' instead of gulp/grunt and then he submits an example where it's as easy as piping through GCC. He's making the wrong assumption that you don't need to setup a build environment when building with make, but to have gcc you will still also need to install g++ and build-tools. Also, he refers to building on Windows using yet another specialist tool, but have you recently tried building anything…

Quite the contrary: I've had to maintain or incorporate some non-standard build processes into several build systems (mostly scons, waf, gyp), and in each one it was difficult or impossible to express what I wanted because the build system wasn't as general as Make.

The single most valuable thing Make has going for it is that the primitive is a Unix pipeline. Anything that can be built with tools you can invoke from your shell can be built with Make, and the language of action is about as universal as it gets for Unix-like systems.

Yes, the dependency syntax is somewhat confusing, and it's not obvious how to understand and debug Makefiles at first glance, but the GNU make documentation is decent, and time spent learning the language and the tools (e.g., "make -d") is much better than trying to reinvent the system, especially without understanding it. Every reinvention I've had the displeasure of working with missed some important (if not widespread) use case.

Re: Build Tools – Make, no more

#36

Post by SchizoDuckie »

MarkPNeyer wrote: post #31
SchizoDuckie wrote: post #12

So he's saying use 'make' instead of gulp/grunt and then he submits an example where it's as easy as piping through GCC. He's making the wrong assumption that you don't need to setup a build environment when building with make, but to have gcc you will still also need to install g++ and build-tools. Also, he refers to building on Windows using yet another specialist tool, but have you recently tried building anything…

> this stuff took 2 years to evolve and a lot of people went through hours of frustration GMake was first released in 1977: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_(software) They've worked on this thing for decades There are 42,000 issues filed for make. if you could resolve each of these issues in 10 minutes, you'd spend 291 days of frustration. http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=make kids these days.

My point was referring to the JS toolchain here mostly. I get that for C, make is the tool for the job.

Re: Build Tools – Make, no more

#38

Post by pekk »

gyepi wrote: post #25

1. Since make has builtin suffix rules, the Makefile could be simplified to: CXX=g++ hello: main.o factorial.o hello.o clean: rm -rf *o hello 2. Shameless plug: he didn't mention redo [1], which is simpler than make and more reliable. The comparable redo scripts to the Makefile would be: cat @all.do redo hello EOF cat hello.do o='main.o factorial.o hello.o' redo-ifchange $o g++ $o -o $3 EOF cat default.o.do redo-ifch…

redo might be simpler and more reliable, but shell isn't. And redo is encouraging even more work to be done in shell. Additionally, the redo version is more verbose and harder to read. While fancier tasks will make's version look horrible relatively quickly, they won't make redo's version look any better.

Re: Build Tools – Make, no more

#39

Post by fidotron »

checker659 wrote: post #30
cscheid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect your downvotes are coming because you haven't mentioned http://www.scons.org/ . Letting you know in case you're not aware of it. (I would have emailed you out-of-band, but there's no contact info in your profile. Sorry for the noise, everyone else)

Scons uses Python more for configuration rather than the control flow. I'm sure most people think that's ok, but I find it limiting and a bit too derpy.

In fairness that's the core of the argument: a significant proportion of people that have had to maintain build tools over long periods believe they should only be configuration and not contain any control flow.

The problem with adding flow control is that establishing the dependencies without actually executing the whole process becomes next to impossible.

Re: Build Tools – Make, no more

#40

Post by ztratar »

sheetjs wrote: post #33

One big advantage of vanilla Make is the community. There are some very nice tools that work well with make (such as https://github.com/mbostock/smash ).

I love documentation that has humor, as long as it doesn't get in the way.

What's special about the Make community as opposed to the Grunt or Gulp communities?

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