The question isn't "do we need makefiles". The question is, what is the problem you're trying to solve? There are lots of cases where make and makefiles are a

The question isn't "do we need makefiles". The question is, what is the problem you're trying to solve? There are lots of cases where make and makefiles are a great solution. A few pointers though: * In most cases, just use GNU make, don't try to stick to just POSIX make. POSIX make is too feature-poor for many situations. * If you have more than a few files, automatically generate the dependencies (e.g., in deps/DIRS/FILE.d files). In practice that often means you need to use GNU make (or automake). Doing that by hand for a few files is fine, but if you try to scale that up, it will become a large always-wrong mess. It's pretty easy to do once you know how - it's just a few lines - but it will save endless headaches. Many compilers already have built-in support for make, so in many cases make is the easy path. * Don't use recursive make (re-execute make in each subdirectory). Run "make" once, and give it all the correct info. It seems like this would be slow, but it's faster & easier to maintain. I routinely get executions of 0.07 seconds on 1000 files when there's no work to do (a really tiny overhead). There are definitely alternatives. I routinely use rake, which calls ruby instead of shell as the command language. Rake can be quite useful, but I don't think it's an automatic win over make at all.