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I completely agree with you. To give the build system the understanding it needs, you have to give up the generality. For me, I've found that the results are best when you use a build system and you use it exactly the way the author intends. For example, Go's built-in build system is so good that you don't even notice it's there. It automatically updates its configuration as you write code. It does a perfect incremental build every time, including tests. The developer experience is basically perfect, because it has a complete understanding of the mapping between source files, dependencies, and outputs. But, it is not extendable, so you're screwed when your Go project also needs to webpack some frontend code, or you need to generate protocol buffers (which involves a C++ binary that runs a Go binary), etc. So, people bolt those features on, and the build system becomes more general, but not quite as good. (Then there's make, which is as good or as bad as you want it to be.) I think super small projects often do get their Makefiles right. But you can manually build small projects with something like "gcc foo.c bar.c -o foobar -lbaz", and so you don't really benefit from any improvement over the bare essentials. (Nothing wrong with keeping your projects tiny in scope, of course!) But, sometimes you don't have the luxury of a super small project, and the Makefiles become quickly unfixable. Like I said, I am most scarred by a buildroot project I worked on (that's embedded Linux, basically). It never built what I expected it to build, and to test anything reliably I either had to yolo my own incremental build or wait a while for a full build. My productivity was minimal. I could switch between client-side and server-side tasks on that project, and so I really only touched the client if it was absolutely necessary. I would never be productive enough to undertake a major project that truly added value with that kind of build system, so I let others that didn't have the server-side experience write the client-side stuff. In that case, the poor build system silently cost our team productivity in terms of artificially splitting the team between people who could tolerate a shitty developer experience and those who couldn't. I don't think anyone has fixed the buildroot problem, either. If you want to build a Linux image today, you are stuck with these problems. Nothing else is general enough to build Linux and the associated random C binaries that you're going to want to run. |
It kind of feels like the best trajectory is to start small with a general build system, and upgrade as needed? And then if you are confident the project will grow, starting with the specific build system fine too.