4 ms·

Sorry i do not understand, is this post a joke? I mean it literally because of the "never happened to me", then the multimillion line makefile doesn't sound rea

by Crinus 7y ago

Sorry i do not understand, is this post a joke? I mean it literally because of the "never happened to me", then the multimillion line makefile doesn't sound real but then you do write something that sounds like someone who has issues with makefiles could say (build order, though common that isn't make's fault - at least as much as isn't a programming language's fault that a program has bugs). So i'm not sure how to take this comment.

kabdib 7y ago
The multi-million line makefile is real. I wish it hadn't been. That was a terrible time. I guess my point is that make doesn't scale, and unavoidably gets messy over time as each project solves the same problems over and over in different, buggy ways. make solves problems you get early in a project ("let's get this handful of files automatically built") and doesn't even try to address issues of modern software development, like build parallelism and dependency management. Its facilities for debugging problems are laughable.
- fao_ 7y ago
  > make solves problems you get early in a project ("let's get this handful of files automatically built") and doesn't even try to address issues of modern software development, like build parallelism and dependency management. Its facilities for debugging problems are laughable. Go look up plan9's mk. It's a remake of the program written by the designers a few decades later with everything they learned from it. Not only are the variables idiomatic, and the spaces problem fixed, but you can ask for output at each stage and (IIRC) view the graph that it builds.
- deng 7y ago
  > The multi-million line makefile is real Of course you quickly get to million-line Makefiles in bigger projects. In C++, if you depend on stuff like Boost, a single file can easily depend on thousands of header files, and every single one must be tracked by Make. But of course, nobody in his right mind would write these dependencies by hand. At my dayjob, the core Makefile is 700 lines. These 700 lines do cross-compilation with gcc/clang for various platforms, unit testing, valgrind, cppcheck, clang-tidy, coverage, and several other things. It is completely non-recursive, runs in parallel without problems, tracks all dependencies, and also works on Windows. Of course this stuff is complicated. Make is very low-level compared to a build-generator like CMake. But if you want a bespoke build system for your project which lets you control every last detail of your build, it is still a good choice.
  - nesadi 7y ago
    Do you know any resources on how to use Make in a sensible/sane way?

by Crinus 7y ago

kabdib 7y ago

The multi-million line makefile is real. I wish it hadn't been. That was a terrible time. I guess my point is that make doesn't scale, and unavoidably gets messy over time as each project solves the same problems over and over in different, buggy ways. make solves problems you get early in a project ("let's get this handful of files automatically built") and doesn't even try to address issues of modern software development, like build parallelism and dependency management. Its facilities for debugging problems are laughable.

fao_ 7y ago
> make solves problems you get early in a project ("let's get this handful of files automatically built") and doesn't even try to address issues of modern software development, like build parallelism and dependency management. Its facilities for debugging problems are laughable. Go look up plan9's mk. It's a remake of the program written by the designers a few decades later with everything they learned from it. Not only are the variables idiomatic, and the spaces problem fixed, but you can ask for output at each stage and (IIRC) view the graph that it builds.
deng 7y ago
> The multi-million line makefile is real Of course you quickly get to million-line Makefiles in bigger projects. In C++, if you depend on stuff like Boost, a single file can easily depend on thousands of header files, and every single one must be tracked by Make. But of course, nobody in his right mind would write these dependencies by hand. At my dayjob, the core Makefile is 700 lines. These 700 lines do cross-compilation with gcc/clang for various platforms, unit testing, valgrind, cppcheck, clang-tidy, coverage, and several other things. It is completely non-recursive, runs in parallel without problems, tracks all dependencies, and also works on Windows. Of course this stuff is complicated. Make is very low-level compared to a build-generator like CMake. But if you want a bespoke build system for your project which lets you control every last detail of your build, it is still a good choice.
- nesadi 7y ago
  Do you know any resources on how to use Make in a sensible/sane way?