Make is convenient for tiny programs, and annoying for larger ones. The system in GHC seems like a nightmare to maintain - I remember having trouble building GH

Make is convenient for tiny programs, and annoying for larger ones. The system in GHC seems like a nightmare to maintain - I remember having trouble building GHC, mainly because it was hard to debug their system. I use Docker for a similar purpose nowadays. It's inconvenient for development, since rebuilding the containers is slow. But it usually works without much trouble. I think there's a GHC Dockerfile somewhere that hvr maintains. I haven't used Shake specifically much. The only thing that bugs me is that Haskell isn't nearly as portable as plain Make. If Shake didn't build the program but rather emitted a build-file that a small reference C program could interpret, I would feel much more comfortable about using it for just about everything. Because I'd know that if I was on some ancient CentOS 4 system, I could still build my software.