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The best thing about make is that it’s available everywhere on POSIX systems. macOS comes with it pre-installed, and every Linux distro or *BSD does too, or off

by jitl 4y ago

The best thing about make is that it’s available everywhere on POSIX systems. macOS comes with it pre-installed, and every Linux distro or *BSD does too, or offers a package for it that’s often depended on by everything else devtools-wise. This means make skills are super transferable; possibly more so than bash/shell skills. Sure there are more user-friendly tools written in the programming language du jour, but those will always need some special snowflake setup process for all of your developers. If you’re cross-platform, now you need encode that in a setup script before your project can build… Maybe you can offer a Makefile just to install `better-make`?

rr888 4y ago
Windows has always been a problem. Now lots of build tools work better cross platform than make.
- asveikau 4y ago
  I use msys gnu make on windows for personal projects.
mkesper 4y ago
Beware, the macOS version is historic (as is macOS bash version).
nine_k 4y ago
It's true, but the compatibility is limited. I had to resort to tricks to make Makefiles which work both on Linux and macOS. I had to mandate the use of GNU make on Macs in other cases. This is on top of having BSD vs GNU coreutils for things like grep, awk, etc, and the ancient bash on macOS. I really wish there was a self-contained tool that could work like make (building a dependency graph and only doing the needed things), with reasonable string / list / map processing built in. (In a limited way, GNU make is such a tool.)
- ddulaney 4y ago
  Does ninja fit your needs? It’s available on just about all of the Linux distros and it’s extremely fast with very few bells and whistles. The language is (for better or worse) designed to be generated by a higher-level tool, so it strips out most of the complexity of GNU make, but it might go too far if you’re looking to do list/map processing in it.
  - hedora 4y ago
    People always claim ninja is fast, but I can't figure out what they mean by that. A typical C++ project build uses 10-10,000 CPU core minutes, and make takes (maybe, in some pessimal situation) 100 milliseconds to schedule and coordinate the build invocations. Even if ninja is 100x faster, it really, really doesn't matter, at all.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      If you build something much smaller, a difference betwen 5 sec and 0.5 sec is pretty noticeable for interactive work, even though 5 sec is not prohibitively long at all.
    - drothlis 4y ago
      They probably mean incremental builds, where the actual compilation doesn't overshadow the "coordination" work. In my (artificial) benchmark, make scaled poorly, taking 70 seconds to process 100k C files worth of dependencies, vs. ninja's 1.5 seconds: https://david.rothlis.net/ninja-benchmark/ https://david.rothlis.net/ninja-benchmark/ Most of make's time was spent processing the ".d" files containing header dependencies (Ninja has a special optimisation for these files, where it reads them the first time they're created, inserts the dependency information into a binary database, then deletes them so it doesn't have to parse them in future invocations). In real world projects, you often end up "abusing" make to add behaviour such as detecting if the compilation flags have changed, and this can make your makefiles slower; whereas ninja has those features built in. Apparently this made a big difference in build times for Chromium (where ninja was born). See this comment by the ninja's author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23182469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23182469
bxparks 4y ago
The macOS version of GNU Make is stuck at 3.81, which I discovered does not print the information needed by vim's quickfix feature when traversing subdirectories using `make -C`. Installing the latest version of GNU Make (4.4) using `brew install make` fixed that problem.
- saurik 4y ago
  The frozen macOS build also has some weird issue with my makefiles where it sometimes finishes the job but then sits there spinning at 100% CPU forever :(.
blueblob 4y ago
I think Windows comes with nmake
- asveikau 4y ago
  Nope, you have to install developer tools to get it. Usually that means visual studio. Historically they also ship compilers and command line dev tools as a separate package, I'm not sure if that's still a thing. Nmake is also not very compatible with gnu or bsd make.
  - mgomez 4y ago
    > Historically they also ship compilers and command line dev tools as a separate package, I'm not sure if that's still a thing. It's still a thing: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/visual-cpp-build-tools/ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/visual-cpp-build-tools/
    - pavon 4y ago
      Note that while the download page and tools don't perform license checks, you are supposed to have a visual studio license to use that package[1]. It is intended as an easy way for VS customers to install tools on build machines and the like without doing a full VS install, not a way for non-customers to get a free compiler. Individuals can get a free license to VS community that would include this package[2], but commercial use requires a paid license. [1] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/#build-tools-for-visual-studio-2022 https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/#build-tools-fo... [2] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/

by jitl 4y ago

rr888 4y ago

Windows has always been a problem. Now lots of build tools work better cross platform than make.

asveikau 4y ago
I use msys gnu make on windows for personal projects.

mkesper 4y ago

Beware, the macOS version is historic (as is macOS bash version).

nine_k 4y ago

It's true, but the compatibility is limited. I had to resort to tricks to make Makefiles which work both on Linux and macOS. I had to mandate the use of GNU make on Macs in other cases. This is on top of having BSD vs GNU coreutils for things like grep, awk, etc, and the ancient bash on macOS. I really wish there was a self-contained tool that could work like make (building a dependency graph and only doing the needed things), with reasonable string / list / map processing built in. (In a limited way, GNU make is such a tool.)

ddulaney 4y ago
Does ninja fit your needs? It’s available on just about all of the Linux distros and it’s extremely fast with very few bells and whistles. The language is (for better or worse) designed to be generated by a higher-level tool, so it strips out most of the complexity of GNU make, but it might go too far if you’re looking to do list/map processing in it.
- hedora 4y ago
  People always claim ninja is fast, but I can't figure out what they mean by that. A typical C++ project build uses 10-10,000 CPU core minutes, and make takes (maybe, in some pessimal situation) 100 milliseconds to schedule and coordinate the build invocations. Even if ninja is 100x faster, it really, really doesn't matter, at all.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    If you build something much smaller, a difference betwen 5 sec and 0.5 sec is pretty noticeable for interactive work, even though 5 sec is not prohibitively long at all.
  - drothlis 4y ago
    They probably mean incremental builds, where the actual compilation doesn't overshadow the "coordination" work. In my (artificial) benchmark, make scaled poorly, taking 70 seconds to process 100k C files worth of dependencies, vs. ninja's 1.5 seconds: https://david.rothlis.net/ninja-benchmark/ https://david.rothlis.net/ninja-benchmark/ Most of make's time was spent processing the ".d" files containing header dependencies (Ninja has a special optimisation for these files, where it reads them the first time they're created, inserts the dependency information into a binary database, then deletes them so it doesn't have to parse them in future invocations). In real world projects, you often end up "abusing" make to add behaviour such as detecting if the compilation flags have changed, and this can make your makefiles slower; whereas ninja has those features built in. Apparently this made a big difference in build times for Chromium (where ninja was born). See this comment by the ninja's author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23182469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23182469

bxparks 4y ago

The macOS version of GNU Make is stuck at 3.81, which I discovered does not print the information needed by vim's quickfix feature when traversing subdirectories using `make -C`. Installing the latest version of GNU Make (4.4) using `brew install make` fixed that problem.

saurik 4y ago
The frozen macOS build also has some weird issue with my makefiles where it sometimes finishes the job but then sits there spinning at 100% CPU forever :(.

blueblob 4y ago

I think Windows comes with nmake

asveikau 4y ago
Nope, you have to install developer tools to get it. Usually that means visual studio. Historically they also ship compilers and command line dev tools as a separate package, I'm not sure if that's still a thing. Nmake is also not very compatible with gnu or bsd make.
- mgomez 4y ago
  > Historically they also ship compilers and command line dev tools as a separate package, I'm not sure if that's still a thing. It's still a thing: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/visual-cpp-build-tools/ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/visual-cpp-build-tools/
  - pavon 4y ago
    Note that while the download page and tools don't perform license checks, you are supposed to have a visual studio license to use that package[1]. It is intended as an easy way for VS customers to install tools on build machines and the like without doing a full VS install, not a way for non-customers to get a free compiler. Individuals can get a free license to VS community that would include this package[2], but commercial use requires a paid license. [1] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/#build-tools-for-visual-studio-2022 https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/#build-tools-fo... [2] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/