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The biggest practical difference is that make can test to see if a file needs to be rebuilt before proceeding.
by dpkirchner 3y ago
The biggest practical difference is that make can test to see if a file needs to be rebuilt before proceeding.
- adrian_b 3y agoYes, exactly this. When compiling a project once from a clean state make has no advantage over a shell script that would use a tool like "parallel" to distribute compilation jobs over all available CPU cores. However writing such a script for parallel compilation is more complex than writing a simple Makefile executed with "make -j N". As you say, the main reason of existence of "make" is the acceleration of the recompilation of a project after incremental changes in the source files, when only the files that depend on the changes are recompiled, saving time.