3 ms·

Just curious, as I am a fan of simple Makefiles, what benefits did you encounter moving from Make -> Just -> Mise?

by elAhmo 1y ago

kstrauser 1y ago
The biggest jump was from Make -> Just. Just -> Mise was minor in comparison, although enough to persuade me. Just has a lot of UI/UX improvements over Make, like a way to list available recipes, convenient ways to define command-line parameters to recipes, consistent and easy syntax, and a whole lot of predefined functions and variables to cover common use cases like finding the number of CPUs on the current system, manipulate strings, etc. It doesn't do things that Make can't do, because Make can do anything a shell script can if you don't mind wrestling it into submission. It just does those things much more easily. But it still has a few warts. Recipes look a lot like a shell script, but they're evaluated separately line-by-line, so you can't set a variable on one line and then read it in another. There are workarounds, but that's the default behavior. And a lot of the time when I'd want a task runner, I also want an environment manager (like uv or cargo or node/npm), so bundling those together matches my workflow better than managing those separately. I have zero bad to say about Just. It's freaking awesome. If Mise disappeared, I'd go back to using Just. I just prefer Mise right now.
- silverwind 1y ago
  Still, Just can not track target dependencies so it will never replace Make or Bazel.
  - tdemin 1y ago
    A task runner is not supposed to replace a build system.
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    I see that as an advantage. Make and Bazel already exist. Just and Mise and other options don’t need to reinvent that wheel. My last employer used Bazel and I liked using Mise as a wrapper around it so that `mise test` invoked the complex command line to run all the tests, kind of like a set of shell aliases that only affect that one repo.
devnulled 1y ago
Taskfile is so much better. mise is what actually got me to start switching everything to Taskfile instead of Makefile as mise easily handles bootstrapping Taskfile and anything else you would need. Had been using make for simple tasks for ~8 years and just got tired of how limiting it is.
- Savageman 1y ago
  Could you explain/share quickly how you combine mise and Taskfile?
mapcars 1y ago
I always thought the idea of Makefiles is great, but the language is terrible and completely unintuitive to understand and learn.
- berkes 1y ago
  Same here. The unintuitiveness has caused three separate teams/project to remove all my Makefiles and port them back to bash scripts, rake tasks or stuff like that. Simply because for most developers it was faster to just whip up a bash script than to modify the Makefile and understand why their change did not do what they expected it to do. Hell, i've been dabbling in Makefiles for at least 25 years and still have to look up the weird mapping expressions when for some reason there's the "nothing to be done" or "No rule to make target `xxx'". Its only killer feature is that it's everywhere, ready to be used by any brand new developer without any work. While "Mise", Just or many of the other replacements need stuff installed and/or setup.
  - bin_bash 1y ago
    this is why we have mise file tasks: https://mise.jdx.dev/tasks/file-tasks.html https://mise.jdx.dev/tasks/file-tasks.html they're literally just bash scripts so you don't need mise to run them. I've heard several users have setups where they have people with and without mise running them.
    - kstrauser 1y ago
      Nice.
- jbverschoor 1y ago
  Nope.. it makes perfect sense if you stop misusing what it's intended for "Make file" as its purpose is to make files. They can be made using a compiler or other scripts, and as it supports files for its dependency tree.
  - kstrauser 1y ago

Just curious, as I am a fan of simple Makefiles, what benefits did you encounter moving from Make -> Just -> Mise?

by elAhmo 1y ago

Just curious, as I am a fan of simple Makefiles, what benefits did you encounter moving from Make -> Just -> Mise?

The biggest jump was from Make -> Just. Just -> Mise was minor in comparison, although enough to persuade me. Just has a lot of UI/UX improvements over Make, like a way to list available recipes, convenient ways to define command-line parameters to recipes, consistent and easy syntax, and a whole lot of predefined functions and variables to cover common use cases like finding the number of CPUs on the current system, manipulate strings, etc. It doesn't do things that Make can't do, because Make can do anything a shell script can if you don't mind wrestling it into submission. It just does those things much more easily. But it still has a few warts. Recipes look a lot like a shell script, but they're evaluated separately line-by-line, so you can't set a variable on one line and then read it in another. There are workarounds, but that's the default behavior. And a lot of the time when I'd want a task runner, I also want an environment manager (like uv or cargo or node/npm), so bundling those together matches my workflow better than managing those separately. I have zero bad to say about Just. It's freaking awesome. If Mise disappeared, I'd go back to using Just. I just prefer Mise right now.

silverwind 1y ago
Still, Just can not track target dependencies so it will never replace Make or Bazel.
- tdemin 1y ago
  A task runner is not supposed to replace a build system.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  I see that as an advantage. Make and Bazel already exist. Just and Mise and other options don’t need to reinvent that wheel. My last employer used Bazel and I liked using Mise as a wrapper around it so that `mise test` invoked the complex command line to run all the tests, kind of like a set of shell aliases that only affect that one repo.

devnulled 1y ago

Taskfile is so much better. mise is what actually got me to start switching everything to Taskfile instead of Makefile as mise easily handles bootstrapping Taskfile and anything else you would need. Had been using make for simple tasks for ~8 years and just got tired of how limiting it is.

Savageman 1y ago
Could you explain/share quickly how you combine mise and Taskfile?

mapcars 1y ago

I always thought the idea of Makefiles is great, but the language is terrible and completely unintuitive to understand and learn.

berkes 1y ago
Same here. The unintuitiveness has caused three separate teams/project to remove all my Makefiles and port them back to bash scripts, rake tasks or stuff like that. Simply because for most developers it was faster to just whip up a bash script than to modify the Makefile and understand why their change did not do what they expected it to do. Hell, i've been dabbling in Makefiles for at least 25 years and still have to look up the weird mapping expressions when for some reason there's the "nothing to be done" or "No rule to make target `xxx'". Its only killer feature is that it's everywhere, ready to be used by any brand new developer without any work. While "Mise", Just or many of the other replacements need stuff installed and/or setup.
- bin_bash 1y ago
  this is why we have mise file tasks: https://mise.jdx.dev/tasks/file-tasks.html https://mise.jdx.dev/tasks/file-tasks.html they're literally just bash scripts so you don't need mise to run them. I've heard several users have setups where they have people with and without mise running them.
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    Nice.
jbverschoor 1y ago
Nope.. it makes perfect sense if you stop misusing what it's intended for "Make file" as its purpose is to make files. They can be made using a compiler or other scripts, and as it supports files for its dependency tree.
- kstrauser 1y ago