Make [was Re: SCons and gdc]

[Paulo Pinto]

On Tuesday, 23 October 2012 at 09:07:34 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-10-22 at 13:19 -0700, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> […]
>> <rant>
>> Well, this is just my biased arrogant opinion, but the root of 
>> the
>> problem is that make is an antiquated overly-simplistic script 
>> that has
>> long outlived its time, but due to historical reasons still 
>> survive
>> festering under the layers of patches that it has acquired 
>> over the
>> course of its sad life. Automake and its ilk are just yet 
>> another
>> (system of) layer of patches upon the same broken system that 
>> doesn't
>> address the fundamental design flaws in make. It's an edifice 
>> of cards
>> that nobody dares touch because, well, it would take too much 
>> effort to
>> reproduce all the tiny obscure cases it has been tweaked for 
>> over the
>> years. But it's nonetheless a nigh unmaintainable fortress of 
>> cards that
>> will collapse at the slightest provocation in the most 
>> unhelpful of
>> ways. It's like implementing the whole of Windows 8 in K&R C. 
>> In this
>> day and age, one would *think* we could do better, but no, 
>> this fossil
>> from the 70's still shambles on, to the unnecessary suffering 
>> of
>> countless generations of new programmers.
>> </rant>
>
> Make was a revelation and a revolution in 1977.
>
> Surprisingly Make remains very useful for small tasks not 
> requiring
> cross-platform portability.
>
> Autotools is very UNIX biased.
>
> CMake keeps Make going. Just.
>
> Waf and SCons work well across platforms for C, C++, D, 
> Fortran, LaTeX,
> Vala, but not JVM-based languages.
>
> Gradle rules on the JVM, along with SBT and Leiningen. Gradle 
> is also
> trying to invade the C++ space.


Even worse is having new generations of developers learning that 
the 70's way of Make and Autotools is the way to go.

--
Paulo