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It's a poor, verbose, arcane solution in every problem space it purports to solve. It was fine in its era, but that's a long time ago. It is completely unsuita

It's a poor, verbose, arcane solution in every problem space it purports to solve. It was fine in its era, but that's a long time ago. It is completely unsuitable as a project management tool and a poor task runner. Also its ubiquity is overhyped. There's no build platform where I can't download the tools I need, that's the entire point of a build platform, and most such platforms come with far more advanced tools pre-installed.

t43562 3y ago
Make has few dependencies so it's a way to build an operating system up from ground 0. Any tool/language that wishes to be generally useful in an OS doesn't want to be built by something that is only available much further up the tree like python. So it gets used a lot and it's only a language for dependencies and rules. It doesn't do "project management". Its the simplicity of what it's trying to that saves it from ever becoming irrelevant - because it can be made to fit almost any use case. It's not a special tool for enforcing one structure or building only one language - something that seems highly regressive to me but which is adopted by many languages now.
- nickelpro 3y ago
  > Any tool/language that wishes to be generally useful in an OS doesn't want to be built by something that is only available much further up the tree like python. This is a non-priority, an unreal use case. I can't build GCC without a functioning C++ compiler and a fairly sophisticated OS environment and that's fine. Real-world use cases for bootstrapping a build environment from rubbing two sticks together are so exceptionally rare as to be near fictional. Even if we allow that such cases exist, they are unicorns, not a thing to design tools around. > It's not a special tool for enforcing one structure or building only one language - something that seems highly regressive to me but which is adopted by many languages now. This is what makes it so unsuitable. A tool that can make no assumptions about its application is less and less useful a tool. A bread knife is better at cutting bread than a plain 10" kitchen knife, a boning knife better for deboning, etc. We live in a world where for every language there are build tools that know far, far more about the needs of that language environment than make, and thus are far better suited.
  - t43562 3y ago
    Make exists and is used widely and not because everyone's too inept to understand your points. The "assumption-making" build tools are the unicorns that inevitably cannot dominate because they're not generally applicable. The more they assume the more niche they become.
    - 0x1ceb00da 3y ago
      Make is popular because many old projects use it and it comes pre-installed on Linux. It's a cultural thing.
      - t43562 3y ago
        It works on an enormous number of platforms with few dependencies. People have got these projects which build on everything from embedded platforms to mainframes and it has taken effort from many different people to achieve that. So you might come up with some new thing that "Works For Me" and now all those people who are peacefully using the tool on their whatever platform have to fiddle with it to make it work again - or the person who made it work is no longer around and that platform loses support for the new versions. When you say "cultural" you make it sound like people do things because they are ignorant and resistant to change but it's worth at least considering that their point of view is quite different.
    - nickelpro 3y ago
      > The "assumption-making" build tools are the unicorns that inevitably cannot dominate because they're not generally applicable. They already do dominate. In the last bastion where make can be said to be popular (C) make has already lost to CMake and its usage shrinks every year [1] The situation is moving even faster for C++ [2] And for literally every other language in the systems programming space (C#, Swift, Rust, D, Go, Zig), make was never a player to begin with. [1]: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2022/c/#which-project-models-or-build-systems-do-you-regularly-use-if-any-two-years https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2022/c/#which-proj... [2]: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2022/cpp/#Which-project-models-or-build-systems-do-you-regularly-use https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2022/cpp/#Which-pr...

t43562 3y ago

Make has few dependencies so it's a way to build an operating system up from ground 0. Any tool/language that wishes to be generally useful in an OS doesn't want to be built by something that is only available much further up the tree like python. So it gets used a lot and it's only a language for dependencies and rules. It doesn't do "project management". Its the simplicity of what it's trying to that saves it from ever becoming irrelevant - because it can be made to fit almost any use case. It's not a special tool for enforcing one structure or building only one language - something that seems highly regressive to me but which is adopted by many languages now.

nickelpro 3y ago
> Any tool/language that wishes to be generally useful in an OS doesn't want to be built by something that is only available much further up the tree like python. This is a non-priority, an unreal use case. I can't build GCC without a functioning C++ compiler and a fairly sophisticated OS environment and that's fine. Real-world use cases for bootstrapping a build environment from rubbing two sticks together are so exceptionally rare as to be near fictional. Even if we allow that such cases exist, they are unicorns, not a thing to design tools around. > It's not a special tool for enforcing one structure or building only one language - something that seems highly regressive to me but which is adopted by many languages now. This is what makes it so unsuitable. A tool that can make no assumptions about its application is less and less useful a tool. A bread knife is better at cutting bread than a plain 10" kitchen knife, a boning knife better for deboning, etc. We live in a world where for every language there are build tools that know far, far more about the needs of that language environment than make, and thus are far better suited.
- t43562 3y ago
  Make exists and is used widely and not because everyone's too inept to understand your points. The "assumption-making" build tools are the unicorns that inevitably cannot dominate because they're not generally applicable. The more they assume the more niche they become.
  - 0x1ceb00da 3y ago
    Make is popular because many old projects use it and it comes pre-installed on Linux. It's a cultural thing.
    - t43562 3y ago
      It works on an enormous number of platforms with few dependencies. People have got these projects which build on everything from embedded platforms to mainframes and it has taken effort from many different people to achieve that. So you might come up with some new thing that "Works For Me" and now all those people who are peacefully using the tool on their whatever platform have to fiddle with it to make it work again - or the person who made it work is no longer around and that platform loses support for the new versions. When you say "cultural" you make it sound like people do things because they are ignorant and resistant to change but it's worth at least considering that their point of view is quite different.
  - nickelpro 3y ago
    > The "assumption-making" build tools are the unicorns that inevitably cannot dominate because they're not generally applicable. They already do dominate. In the last bastion where make can be said to be popular (C) make has already lost to CMake and its usage shrinks every year [1] The situation is moving even faster for C++ [2] And for literally every other language in the systems programming space (C#, Swift, Rust, D, Go, Zig), make was never a player to begin with. [1]: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2022/c/#which-project-models-or-build-systems-do-you-regularly-use-if-any-two-years https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2022/c/#which-proj... [2]: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2022/cpp/#Which-project-models-or-build-systems-do-you-regularly-use https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2022/cpp/#Which-pr...