[finaliteration]

I’ve been using Makefiles for Go development basically since I started with the language. It’s really effective for me and makes compilation and, in my case, deployment to AWS Lambdas via CloudFormation commands (also invoked by Make) really simple. It’s also easy to bring someone up to speed with how building and deploying works.

[rob74]

It might make it easier to bring someone up to speed for your project, but he won't learn a damn thing about building other Go projects - I guess that's one of the arguments that the opponents of make, er, make...

[marcus_holmes]

there's no standard for building Go projects (except the use of "go build"). Make is common enough that learning how to use it is a worthwhile use of time for a new Go developer.

I also use a Makefile for my projects, for all the above reasons, but mostly so that I can hand it to a new team member and say "clone the repo, install make if you haven't already, then choose either make docker_init or make localdev_init" and know that they'll have a working installation about 15 minutes later.

Not supporting Windows is a furphy - we're developing a Linux-based web server. There's no point trying to develop this on Windows. Yes, you can do it with Docker, but you'll always be wondering if that error was from your code, or from some misalignment of stuff in your tech stack.