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The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

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Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#361

Post by gavinpc »

Jtsummers wrote: post #230
ajross wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you fix that with your preferred make replacement? None of that has anything to do with make, you're trying to solve a stateful problem ("did I send this or not?") without using any state. That just doesn't work. It's not a make thing at all.

Lisper was replying to the OP who suggested using Make for general workflows. Make falls apart when your workflow doesn't naturally involve file modification tasks. With regard to my last comment (the problem with small changes in a file resulting in full-system recompilation), see Tup. It maintains a database of what's happened. So when foo.c is altered it will regenerate foo.o. But if foo.o is not changed, you can…

I love Tup, and have used it in production builds. It is the optimal solution for the problem that it solves, viz, a deterministic file-based build describable with static rules. To start using it, you probably have to "clean up" your existing build.

I don't use it anymore, for several reasons. One is that it would be too off-the-wall for my current work environment. The deeper reason is that it demands a very static view of the world. What I really want is not fast incremental builds, but a live programming environment. We're building custom tooling for that (using tsserver), and it's been very interesting. It's challenging, but one tradeoff is that you don't really care how long a build takes, incremental or otherwise.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#362

Post by com2kid »

ratboy666 wrote: post #292
com2kid wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dir works fine for that. :) I actually didn't know that dir supported multiple globs for filenames! I've never had a need for that. Super cool.

Um... no it doesn't. It takes each space delimited name as a new name. You will need to add "" and quote the names -- but Windows shell only has one level of quoting, (") which means you can't easily type the command you need. Unix shell is a bit better. Unix only appears worse because people do attempt scripting. Directory of C:\Users\fred 12/14/2017 04:44 PM 1,556 new 2.txt 1 File(s) 1,556 bytes 0 Dir(s) 75,989,876…

> Um... no it doesn't. It takes each space delimited name as a new name. You will need to add "" and quote the names -- but Windows shell only has one level of quoting, (") which means you can't easily type the command you need. Unix shell is a bit better. Unix only appears worse because people do attempt scripting.

Ah I see, you have a file "new 2.txt", I was a bit confused.

Not sure what you mean by only 1 level of quoting being a problem, sorry.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#363

Post by gkya »

neonscribe wrote: post #178

I used make heavily in the 80s and 90s, but haven't much since then. Recently I started a project that had source files getting processed into PDF files, for use by humans. Since this is the 21st century, those files have spaces in their names. At a certain point, I realized that I should be managing this processing somehow, so I thought of using a simple Makefile. A little searching reveals that the consensus on usi…

Spaces in filenames create troubles with almost every command line tool. cut(1), awk(1), find(1), xargs(1), what not. How do you quote them, do you need to use \0 as a separator instead, do other commands on the pipeline support \0 separators? What happens after a couple expansions, passing stuff from one script to another?

And what the heck happened on 31 dec 1999 that the world became a different place where suddenly people realised: there were these space things, quite useful they were, why don't we tuck them into every file name and URL and who knows what?

People have better things to do than dealing with these things.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#364

Post by gkya »

reificator wrote: post #239
hzhou321 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demanding the support of spaces in filenames significantly complicates code as simple space delimination no longer works and other delimination schemes are much more error prone -- forgetting balancing quotes, any one? While you are allowing spaces, you probabaly are allowing all possible code points or maybe even a null byte? Thinking about it gives me headaches. I hate hearing people using 21st century or modern as…

Human beings who name things are going to use spaces. That spaces were used as delimiters for computers is somewhere between unfortunate and a colossal mistake. But to use that as evidence of why spaces should not be supported in filenames is putting the cart before the horse. The goal of software is not to perpetuate whatever mistakes have been made in the past. It's to solve problems for human beings. And human bei…

Not all languages have (or had) spaces.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#365

Post by gkya »

oblio wrote: post #283
hzhou321 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demanding the support of spaces in filenames significantly complicates code as simple space delimination no longer works and other delimination schemes are much more error prone -- forgetting balancing quotes, any one? While you are allowing spaces, you probabaly are allowing all possible code points or maybe even a null byte? Thinking about it gives me headaches. I hate hearing people using 21st century or modern as…

You solution is a “boil the oceans” one typically proposed by engineers. You can re-program computers. You can’t re-program millions of people. Every natural language uses spaces to separate things. You can accept that or you can keep tilting at windmills. In every branch of science, reality wins. If your model can’t accomodate reality it’s either completely wrong or it needs adjustments, at least.

> Every natural language uses spaces to separate things.

Nope. You don't space out each word when speaking. If you were speaking about writing systems, not all writing systems use spaces as word delimiters. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_(punctuation)

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#366

Post by jimktrains2 »

jstimpfle wrote: post #316
kstrauser wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But realistically, you don't do that in C IMHO, that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If it were reasonably easy to do that in C, it would be done more.

C is a systems programming language. It doesn't have closures or other features from functional programming. In other words, you can't "create functions at runtime". That is why you basically never see a function returning another function.

So, go is also a "systems" language, so the terms more or less meaningless now. Assuming you mean a language we can easily compile to an independent binary capable of being run directly on a microprocessor with no support, I offer you rust as a counter-example.

Also, functional programming and returning functions does not mean they are created at runtime.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#367

Post by gkya »

lisper wrote: post #158
rschloming wrote: post #95

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's really a workflow automation tool, That's true. > and the UX for that is actually pretty close to what you would want. That is so not true. Make has deeply woven into it the assumption that the product of workflows are files, and that the way you can tell the state of a file is by its last modification date. That's often true for builds (which is why make works reasonably well for builds), but often not true f…

A language that uses lots of parens to delimit expressions is incredibly bad UX, especially when you try to balance a complex expression, but hopefully there are tools like Paredit to deal with that, so that I can write my Emacs Lisp with pleasure about every day. Similarly, any decent editor will help you out with using correct indentation with Makefiles.

Last modification date is not always a correct heuristic to use, but it's quite cheap compared to hashing things all the time.

Make is a tool for transforming files. I wonder how it's not quite natural and correct for it to assume it's working with files?

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#368

Post by gkya »

Jtsummers wrote: post #205
ajross wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like, for example? To be serious, those are sort of contrived. "Sending a notification" isn't something you want to be managing as state at all. What you probably mean is that you want to send that notification once, on an "official" build. And that requires storing the fact that the notification was sent and a timestamp somewhere (like, heh, a file). And as for building into a database... that just seems weird to me…

I need to send an email every time a log file updates, just the tail, simple make file: send: foo.log tail foo.log | email watch make send Crap, it keeps sending it. Ok, so you work out some scheme involving temporary files which act as guards against duplicate processing. Or you write a script which conditionally sends the email by storing the hash of the previous transmission and comparing it against the hash of th…

You're misusing make here. This should be a shell script or a program that uses inotify/kqueue, or a loop with sleeps and stat calls.

Re: The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects

#370

Post by kraig911 »

A lot of good arguments about using and not using make. Count me in the not using make camp. IMO it's just simply overkill. JS work nowadays is so modular if we were talking about configuring a monolith service at build time... sure yeah. Meanwhile I just wanna make this div purple.
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