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I think that the appeal of just is that it is simpler than make. It is not checking timestamps of files, but executes a DAG of tasks unconditionally.
by aerzen 2y ago
I think that the appeal of just is that it is simpler than make. It is not checking timestamps of files, but executes a DAG of tasks unconditionally.
- mijoharas 2y agoMy first thought was that that was dropping one of the main features of make. On reflection though, the timestamp dependant part isn't really something used much nowadays apart from compiling C. It'd be cool if it was an opt-in feature for just files so that it could actually function as a replacement for make in all cases. I went looking in the docs and found this[0] which I'd missed last time I looked into justfiles. [0] https://github.com/casey/just?tab=readme-ov-file#what-are-the-idiosyncrasies-of-make-that-just-avoids https://github.com/casey/just?tab=readme-ov-file#what-are-th...
- daghamm 2y agoI don't really buy his justification that ".PHONY: xxx" is hard to remember so we should have a completly new tool instead. Make has its issues, but it also has two big advantages: it's simple and everyone already have it.
- IshKebab 2y agoEveryone already has it... on Linux and Mac. It's pretty rare for it to be available on Windows. That said I kind of agree. I like the idea of `just` but it does seem like they have just created a complicated DSL. I think it is better to just write your infra scripting in a real language. I generally use Deno or Rust itself and a thin wrapper that `cargo run`'s it. Using Rust eliminates a dependency.
- mort96 2y agoAnyone who's halfway serious about software development on Windows surely has make there too, and it's not like non-developers are the target audience for 'just' scripts
- IshKebab 2y ago> Anyone who's halfway serious about software development on Windows surely has make there too Not even remotely. I know it might be hard to imagine if you only program on Linux/Mac but there's a whole world out there that isn't built on janky shell scripts and Makefiles. If you use C# or Java or Visual C++ or Qt on Windows it's pretty unlikely that you'd have Make. It's kind of a pain to install and you don't need it.
- krageon 2y agoLiterally zero of the hundreds of devs I know that do software development on windows have make installed. Why would they? It's not usual in the space at all, that's msbuild
- galdosdi 2y agoI agree, and even more strongly: you don't even need to remember .PHONY as long as your target names don't overlap with actual filenames, which is usually easy. In fact, I didn't even know about .PHONY and have used make for a long time. That's what's great about it, even if you stick to the most basic features make is incredibly easy and straightforward. Dare I say, it "just" works lol. I hate the proliferation of new tools that are the same as a tool that's been around for 20 years and is no different in any significant way except being trendy. Just unnecessary entropy. Our job is to manage and reduce, not maximize entropy.
- Arnavion 2y agoAlso this: >The explicit list of phony targets, written separately from the recipe definitions, also introduces the risk of accidentally defining a new non-phony target. ... seems to think the only way to define phony targets is: .PHONY: foo bar foo: ... bar: ... ... which has the problem that bar's definition is distant from its declaration as a phony target. But this form is equivalent and doesn't have that problem: .PHONY: foo foo: ... .PHONY: bar bar: ... This ability to declare dependencies of a target over multiple definitions isn't even unique to `.PHONY`.
- dijit 2y ago> it's simple and everyone already have it. Not always, Go programmers for example often forget that they need C build-tools for their platform to get Make. It's also just about the furthest thing from simple, the language is nasty so people just use it as an executor, which is a lot of tooling for such a simple use-case.
- daghamm 2y agoWouldn't a shell script work just as well than? I'm not against new better tooling, but I also want to keep my dev machine reasonably clean.