Make will check if your dependencies need to be rebuilt, and will only rebuild them if they have changed / been updated. This is hugely valuable because you ca

Make will check if your dependencies need to be rebuilt, and will only rebuild them if they have changed / been updated. This is hugely valuable because you can save build times by not needlessly re-compiling the whole world. Linking times are always going to remain the same regardless, but you can definitely make the process more efficient. An example from C/C++ is not generating new object (*.o) files for source files that haven't changed (and who's dependencies haven't changed). Make also has a pretty standardized syntax and has a bunch of open source implementations. This may not seem to matter since Python has many implementations (as an example), but remember that make is just a program, not a full platform. Python may execute differently depending on the version of Python, the version of any library you're using in the process, or even on the architecture (okay, maybe not in Python so much, but in some scripting languages it could matter). Make only depends on the version of make that you install. Lastly, make comes with parallelism in your build mostly for free. Calling `make -j4 all` will run up to 4 rules at a time in parallel. In some cases this won't work because your dependencies are tangled in a mess and parallelism can't be guaranteed, but it's a lot easier to get parallel builds for most projects with make compared to something like Python, which either has to use something like the multiprocessing library, or pray that the GIL doesn't bite. In my opinion, this is not something you should be baking yourself into your build system. Make has done it and it has been done right for years.