On Mon, 2012-10-22 at 13:19 -0700, H. S. Teoh wrote: […] > <rant> > Well, this is just my biased arrogant opinion, but the root of the > problem is that make is an antiquated overly-simplistic script that has > long outlived its time, but due to historical reasons still survive > festering under the layers of patches that it has acquired over the > course of its sad life. Automake and its ilk are just yet another > (system of) layer of patches upon the same broken system that doesn't > address the fundamental design flaws in make. It's an edifice of cards > that nobody dares touch because, well, it would take too much effort to > reproduce all the tiny obscure cases it has been tweaked for over the > years. But it's nonetheless a nigh unmaintainable fortress of cards that > will collapse at the slightest provocation in the most unhelpful of > ways. It's like implementing the whole of Windows 8 in K&R C. In this > day and age, one would *think* we could do better, but no, this fossil > from the 70's still shambles on, to the unnecessary suffering of > countless generations of new programmers. > </rant>
Make was a revelation and a revolution in 1977. Surprisingly Make remains very useful for small tasks not requiring cross-platform portability. Autotools is very UNIX biased. CMake keeps Make going. Just. Waf and SCons work well across platforms for C, C++, D, Fortran, LaTeX, Vala, but not JVM-based languages. Gradle rules on the JVM, along with SBT and Leiningen. Gradle is also trying to invade the C++ space. -- Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 voip: sip:[email protected] 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: [email protected] London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk skype: russel_winder
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