Sure. Here's viola, a web browser from the early 90s, with a replacement makefile (GNU make) that's a bit more sane: CC = gcc -std=c99 -Wall -Wextra

Sure. Here's viola, a web browser from the early 90s, with a replacement makefile (GNU make) that's a bit more sane: CC = gcc -std=c99 -Wall -Wextra -pedantic CFLAGS = -g LDFLAGS = -g LDLIBS = -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lICE -lSM -lXpm -lX11 -lXext -lXmu -lXt -lm VIOLA_PATH := $(shell pwd)/resources override CFLAGS += -DPOSIX_C_SOURCE=199309L \ -D_POSIX_SOURCE -D_XOPEN_SOURCE \ -D_BSD_SOURCE -D_SVID_SOURCE \ -DDEFAULT_VIOLA_PATH='"$(VIOLA_PATH)"'\ -DVIOLA %.a: $(AR) $(ARFLAGS) $@ $? viola/viola: $(patsubst %.c,%.o,$(wildcard viola/*.c)) \ libIMG/libIMG.a \ libXPA/src/libxpa.a \ libStyle/libStyle.a \ libWWW/libWWW.a \ parmcheck.o libIMG/libIMG.a : $(patsubst %.c,%.o,$(wildcard libIMG/*.c)) libXPA/src/libxpa.a : $(patsubst %.c,%.o,$(wildcard libXPA/src/*.c)) libStyle/libStyle.a : $(patsubst %.c,%.o,$(wildcard libStyle/*.c)) libWWW/libWWW.a : $(patsubst %.c,%.o,$(wildcard libWWW/*.c)) It's 155,000 lines of C code across 361 files. Not shown are the nearly 900 lines that make up the dependencies, but using `makedepend` (which came with my system) makes short work of that. I have a more complicated project that compiles an application written in Lua into a Linux executable. It wasn't hard to write, given that you can always add new rules to `make`, such as converting a `.lua` file to a `.o` file: %.o : %.lua $(BIN2C) $(B2CFLAGS) -o $*.l.c $< $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -c -o $@ $*.l.c $(RM) $*.l.c Okay, that requires a custom tool (`bin2c`) but can other build systems do this? I honestly don't know.