I honestly have no idea why there's so much fandom towards Make in this thread, but for me there are a few absolutely devastating problems with Makefiles: a) M

I honestly have no idea why there's so much fandom towards Make in this thread, but for me there are a few absolutely devastating problems with Makefiles: a) Mtimes-as-change-detection is fundamentally broken given the reality of networked file systems and... physics. (Minor problem, but extremely annoying to work around in practice.) b) Nobody can actually really understand all the interdependencies between all the code in their system(s!), and yet Makefiles expect you to specify all of that explicitly?!? Yes, you could technically specify that -- and you'll want to -- but you won't, because you don't know and don't have the time. c) Make support for builds that change the structure of the build during the build is abysmal. E.g. after "processing foo.xml we now have more files than we had before! What are you going to do?". Well, in Make it's some sort of custom solution with ".d" files and "gcc -M" or whatever. This is utterly broken in that it pushes all the complexity onto the user. So, yes, an elegant model, but it doesn't actually solve the problem. If you want to see a better solution see the "Shake" paper.