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by throwawaylabor
2031 days ago
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Make build configurations can be difficult to understand for newcomers in the industry. If the goal is to obscure the code, by all means continue using the older tools. If the goal is continued maintenance, then encouraging new engineers to explore and read the codebase with tools they can comprehend is critical. disclaimer: have not used these particular tools, but the domain is nice and polite |
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Here are some real reasons why Make isn't the end-all:
- Make doesn't allow platform selection in a nice way. - Make doesn't work on Windows natively (no, NMake doesn't count). - Recursive make doesn't work well at all. - Make doesn't track byproducts or deleted artifacts. - Make doesn't have auto-clean. - Make doesn't facilitate out-of-source builds. - Make itself isn't a scripting language (arguably good/bad). - Make doesn't facilitate compiler selection cross-platform, so things like MSVC are nearly impossible to integrate nicely without the use of the developer tools prompt. - Make can't (elegantly) handle a number of rule cases, such as single-input multiple-output rules (it can, but it's a hack).
Not sure why you think Make is unapproachable. That's like saying shell scripting is unapproachable. No developer worth a damn is going to avoid shell scripting, and as long as they understand "this file turns into this file using this command" then Make makes sense.
As with all tools, Make and Autotools and CMake and probably Plz will be misused by developers that think they're being clever. In actuality, they make things worse at best and unusable/unmaintainable at worst.
As a build systems designer, I've evaluated Plz personally and found it to be neat but not suitable for most of the problems I think build systems should solve.