2 ms·

I will chime in in agreement with you, since the replies here are mostly to the contrary. Writing Makefiles by hand sucks eggs. It's really worse than this bec

by jchw 4y ago

I will chime in in agreement with you, since the replies here are mostly to the contrary. Writing Makefiles by hand sucks eggs. It's really worse than this because this probably assumed a specific Linux setup at least, but everything goes out the window once Windows is in the mix. If having to deal with potentially multiple shells was a problem with Make, having to deal with multiple shells on Windows (where it could be CMD, PowerShell, or a UNIX like shell under MSys or Cygwin...) is untenable. Today the only obviously valid reason to use Make is because you have to or already are. Most Linux distros ship Ninja. Hell, MSVC ships Ninja. There are many examples of Makefiles for open source projects that validate how ugly things can get without needing to be Google scale. One of the most elegant Makefile setups I can think of is Near's setup for bsnes/higan,and honest to goodness, it's still a pretty horrific mess. I don't want to be hyperbolic, but also it's irresponsible for people to suggest you should just use Make. You shouldn't just use Make. Not even as a beginner. If you wanted a nice turnkey solution for a beginner, I'd suggest CMake or Meson, both of which happily generate Ninja files and also have the bonus of supporting Windows well. CMake has broad ecosystem support, despite it's many shortcomings. It's far from elegant, but definitely practical.

jart 4y ago
That's Windows' problem and it's not even a real problem anymore because make runs fine in WSL. Microsoft has pretty much gotten their act together in the last four years in supporting open developer tools. They've got bash and ANSI support. It's great. Give them credit where credit is due. It's time to say goodbye to shoehorning unix devops into win32. Doing that gets sillier each year. Especially since, as Microsoft has been generous in supporting tools, they've certainly been boiling the frog with their win32 environment. The last time I extracted a zip file containing dev work on Windows, it extracted at 64 kilobytes per second to the local hard drive, because their virus technology was scanning and uploading everything I was doing. How can you build software in that kind of environment? And why is it that it's always the voices coming from our own community who insist that we should. People shouldn't fall that far in love with an operating system because even with perfect support, builds are still going to go slow on Windows. Use WSL.
- jchw 4y ago
  You can't really use WSL to develop or use native Windows software. WSL is good for when your target is Linux and otherwise not applicable. It's also not Window's problem. It's yours, when you try to develop software and have Windows users.
  - Cloudef 4y ago
    Mingw exists
    - jchw 4y ago
      This only makes the problem much worse. (Note that I literally reference MSys and Cygwin in my original reply. However, these options are neither ideal for making good Windows binaries nor are they great facsimiles for UNIX. Almost any Makefile needs to be carefully constructed so that MinGW works, especially if you want to support more than just very specific MinGW setups. And there's other downsides I didn't get into, such as licensing problems with winpthreads, and silent dubious behavior like pseudo relocs. I don't recommend using MinGW.)

by jchw 4y ago

jart 4y ago

That's Windows' problem and it's not even a real problem anymore because make runs fine in WSL. Microsoft has pretty much gotten their act together in the last four years in supporting open developer tools. They've got bash and ANSI support. It's great. Give them credit where credit is due. It's time to say goodbye to shoehorning unix devops into win32. Doing that gets sillier each year. Especially since, as Microsoft has been generous in supporting tools, they've certainly been boiling the frog with their win32 environment. The last time I extracted a zip file containing dev work on Windows, it extracted at 64 kilobytes per second to the local hard drive, because their virus technology was scanning and uploading everything I was doing. How can you build software in that kind of environment? And why is it that it's always the voices coming from our own community who insist that we should. People shouldn't fall that far in love with an operating system because even with perfect support, builds are still going to go slow on Windows. Use WSL.

jchw 4y ago
You can't really use WSL to develop or use native Windows software. WSL is good for when your target is Linux and otherwise not applicable. It's also not Window's problem. It's yours, when you try to develop software and have Windows users.
- Cloudef 4y ago
  Mingw exists
  - jchw 4y ago
    This only makes the problem much worse. (Note that I literally reference MSys and Cygwin in my original reply. However, these options are neither ideal for making good Windows binaries nor are they great facsimiles for UNIX. Almost any Makefile needs to be carefully constructed so that MinGW works, especially if you want to support more than just very specific MinGW setups. And there's other downsides I didn't get into, such as licensing problems with winpthreads, and silent dubious behavior like pseudo relocs. I don't recommend using MinGW.)