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A comment on Time for Makefiles to Make a Comeback. Parent comment

Re:Time for Makefiles to Make a Comeback by Yaggo on Wednesday September 06, 2017 @05:21AM (#15182240)
I would say it's partly because of the design of make.

A Makefile consists of separate commands¹ and is heavily file-based¹, which makes it rather slow and doesn't allow to keep state (in memory) between re-runs. Traditionally this hasn't been bottleneck, because compiling C code was relatively slow operation, but modern web development tools prefer to work with in-memory streams instead of invoking executables for tiny files on disk.

I'm not saying you cannot do things with make, but in NodeJS/web ecosystem it just doesn't feel as natural/flexible as the "native" NodeJS-based toolchain.

[1] Great for interoperability, but sometimes more tailored solution is worth it.

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Re:Time for Makefiles to Make a Comeback by akvadrako on Wednesday September 06, 2017 @12:09PM (#15184749)
Launching a process on Linux only takes about 2ms, and make only needs to do it for parts that change. There is no reason you couldn't use a make-based system to get incremental rebuilds with under 100ms latency, which is about as good as most people get with native JS systems.
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