Make [was Re: SCons and gdc]

[Russel Winder]

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.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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