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by latchkey 1256 days ago
Just [0] was discussed on HN. I think I'll give that a shot next time I have to write something like this. .PHONY is lame.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34315779

2 comments

I strongly recommend `just`. I used it successfully with projects written in OCaml, Rust, Go, Elixir and Lua. Define a few tasks, give them 1-2 character aliases, profit.

Super ergonomic.

Though I have to admit, Go and Rust projects hardly needed `just`; the `go` program and the `cargo` tool are that good. I used `just` in them mostly to have short aliases and common names for tasks.

> Go and Rust projects hardly needed just

It depends on what you're producing as output.

One of my golang projects needs `-s -w -X '' -trimpath` along with separate GOOS and GOARCH depending on platform.

It is nice to have all that documented in a build file.

Yep, agreed!
I really like how easy it is with Just to make it self-documenting.

There's some good things about Makefiles, yes, but there's also a lot of weird legacy functionality. Make was meant to create files and directories, and the .PHONY functionality seems to be a workaround added to make it usable as a general-purpose task runner.