Please – A cross-language build system

Re:Please – A cross-language build system by ur-whale on Saturday November 28, 2020 @02:49PM (#25239957)

Make is only good at one thing: calculating how to execute a dependency graph to produce a specific target.

Everything else that is needed for a modern build system is lacking:

    - expressive scripting language

    - platform-related configuration

    - feature-related configuration

    - handling hierarchical projects

    - properly handling rebuilds when the Makefile itself has been changed

    - dealing with dynamically generated parts of the dependency graph

    - handling third-party dependencies

    - build reproducibility

    - etc... the list is very long

This is why people these days mostly take the path of generating Makefiles, because make is only good at one thing: executing a statically defined dependency graph.

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Re:Please – A cross-language build system by saurik on Saturday November 28, 2020 @06:16PM (#25241403)

Make is a programming language: it is only good at executing that language, and that language kind of sucks, but saying Make is somehow only good at executing static dependency graphs is a fundamental misunderstanding of Make (but AFAIK might be a good description of say, ninja). All of the Make scripts I have written for the past 15 years have dynamically generated configuration and autodetected files and calculated version numbers and essentially done all of this work that somehow you think Make can't do.

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Re:Please – A cross-language build system by ur-whale on Sunday November 29, 2020 @06:18PM (#25249035)

Anything that is (like make) turing complete can be made to do all the things you list.

At a very minor cost after all: your sanity.

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