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Jam – Replacement for Make

• peter_d_sherman 6y ago
  >"Why is Jam better than Make? There really are a lot of reasons, we name just a few of them. Compiling simple things with Jam is trivial. However, compiling complex projects (usually with complex directory hierarchies) is still very simple. Jam automatically scans source files for #include statements and computes header dependencies automatically, and it does so fast. The Jam language is simple and expressive, and lets you define your own build rules, actions, and functions very easily, unlike the ALGOL-like syntax of Makefiles. Jam knows about platform-specific directory separators. Jam is fully customizable, and easy to extend. Jam has a tiny footprint, and is a lot faster than Make at building large projects (independent of target build times, of course). We have already mentioned that you don't need to modify Jamfiles in order to compile the same project with distinct compilers and toolsets. Jam parses all Jamfiles in a project before beginning to build targets. It knows the full dependency graph and can do parallel builds safely with the ‘-j’ flag. Jam is compatible with Autoconf. All configuration-specific definitions are gathered in a single file named ‘Jamrules’ that is shared by all Jamfiles of the same project. The ‘Jamrules’ file is generally generated by processing a ‘Jamrules.in’ template with the ‘configure’ script on Unix systems."