4 ms·

‘just’ apparently isn’t a build system, just a ‘task runner’. So I assume it doesn’t need/want to implement parallelism.

by q3k 5y ago

dahfizz 5y ago
It sounds like `just` is not a replacement for make, then. It seems like it could be a nice wrapper on top, i.e. `just build` could invoke the make build system.
toast0 5y ago
Parallelism is pretty useful for just a 'task runner' too. I've (ab)used Make for server pushes, and sometimes you want those to run one at a time, and sometimes you want -j 100 (sometimes -j 100 is even effective).
- jandrese 5y ago
  The key aspect here is that since Make knows what the dependencies are it has enough information to automatically parallelize the task. A simple task runner would need to be specifically configured with the dependency graph, and if you have that you've just re-created Make.
  - toast0 5y ago
    If I'm using the task runner for deployment, it doesn't need to have a sophisticated dependency graph, it "just" needs to be able to have a list of tasks that are declared as independent/parallelizable, and a way to specify how many to run at once. Sophisticated dependencies are nice to have of course, maybe make push-all transitively includes building the thing locally, but it's still useful to have just the push step (or the reload step, etc), have optional parallelism. If you start to build a tool that does do these things first, in order; then these things in any order; then these other things, that does look a lot like Make. but if you just handle ordered steps and independent steps, and let a person do the mixing, then it's not nearly as much work as Make.
    - enriquto 5y ago
      > Sophisticated dependencies are nice to have What are you talking about? Make does not deal with "sophisticated" dependencies. Make is insultingly simple, not sophisticated at all. It's just a damn directed tree. The simplest data structure in computer science after the array. There are also some fancier shortcuts for expressing rules in makefiles, but you can ignore them and use only the simple stuff. That's already a much more powerful tool than "just".

‘just’ apparently isn’t a build system, just a ‘task runner’. So I assume it doesn’t need/want to implement parallelism.

by q3k 5y ago

‘just’ apparently isn’t a build system, just a ‘task runner’. So I assume it doesn’t need/want to implement parallelism.

dahfizz 5y ago

It sounds like `just` is not a replacement for make, then. It seems like it could be a nice wrapper on top, i.e. `just build` could invoke the make build system.

toast0 5y ago

Parallelism is pretty useful for just a 'task runner' too. I've (ab)used Make for server pushes, and sometimes you want those to run one at a time, and sometimes you want -j 100 (sometimes -j 100 is even effective).

jandrese 5y ago
The key aspect here is that since Make knows what the dependencies are it has enough information to automatically parallelize the task. A simple task runner would need to be specifically configured with the dependency graph, and if you have that you've just re-created Make.
- toast0 5y ago
  If I'm using the task runner for deployment, it doesn't need to have a sophisticated dependency graph, it "just" needs to be able to have a list of tasks that are declared as independent/parallelizable, and a way to specify how many to run at once. Sophisticated dependencies are nice to have of course, maybe make push-all transitively includes building the thing locally, but it's still useful to have just the push step (or the reload step, etc), have optional parallelism. If you start to build a tool that does do these things first, in order; then these things in any order; then these other things, that does look a lot like Make. but if you just handle ordered steps and independent steps, and let a person do the mixing, then it's not nearly as much work as Make.
  - enriquto 5y ago
    > Sophisticated dependencies are nice to have What are you talking about? Make does not deal with "sophisticated" dependencies. Make is insultingly simple, not sophisticated at all. It's just a damn directed tree. The simplest data structure in computer science after the array. There are also some fancier shortcuts for expressing rules in makefiles, but you can ignore them and use only the simple stuff. That's already a much more powerful tool than "just".