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Comment by xyzzy_plugh | Hacker News Reader

That's because people write shitty makefiles. Most makefiles I see are full of improperly used double colon rules, phony targets not marked .PHONY and implicit ordering assumptions.

If `-j' was enabled by default, then it would be much harder for writers to develop these issues. But I suspect most of these authors, who are already unwilling to learn make properly would simply give up and use a different tool.

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> That's because people write shitty makefiles.

Which, coincidentally, is my main complaint with Make: It's way too easy to write shitty Makefiles. There are way too many wrong ways to do things. Arguably this is a community problem and not a tool problem, but it doesn't change the fact that most Makefiles are written badly.

I used Make professionally for 5 years and have since moved to other tech stacks that don't require Make but have tools that are far worse in every other way (cough Ant cough). But IMO the reason they win out is they are far less flexible, so there are fewer ways to do things, so they work better in aggregate.

Build tooling is something that most devs look at very rarely, so they never build expertise. Ergo, build tooling shouldn't require expertise.

If my theory holds out, I feel Gradle will become the new Make in a few years or a decade - very powerful but too many wrong ways to do things.

Make is more than 40 years old -- 40 fucking years! And we still use it. It's everywhere. It's not going anywhere. Gradle will not replace it.

Why? Because make works. Because it's actually easy to understand if you've read the manual. It's simple. People try to make it do really complicated things, which you are better off putting in a script or another program. At it's core, make works and does its job very, very well.

Here is a very beautiful, readable, portable makefile: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Makefile

It's hard to write portable anything without details leaking out. Go is the best implementation I've ever seen here. It works identically everywhere I've tried it. The approach the Go team has taken is extreme. I think that says a lot.

Both these tools are very simple, and limit what you can do. When you try to go outside the box, you hurt yourself. Don't hurt yourself.

Tools like Gradle make it real easy to hurt yourself without realizing it.

We don't literally use make, exactly as it was forty years ago.

> Here is a very beautiful, readable, portable makefile: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Makefile

That's a GNU Make Makefile. It's portable to installations where you have GNU Make ported already.

Look, this battle has been lost for ages. People only seem to write portable Makefiles by accident and usually just target the implementation of make on the platform they're developing on.

Unfortunately, when you learn Gradle, you also have to learn its procedural description language, Apache Groovy, with its many quirks, such as when to use

    something "abc"

and when to use

    something = "defg"

The problem is that most people don't set out to be masters of make. They just want to get their shit built so they can make forward progress on the thing they want to create.

Having to learn all of these subtleties is what gets you into these problems in the first place. I'll happily take a more opinionated build tool with proper escape hatches over something that expects you to know it in detail for even the most basic tasks.

I really hate this attitude. The same people who don't grok Make also don't grok git or bourne shell or who knows what else. Don't take shortcuts in understanding the fundamental tools of your stack. Your build system is just as important to your project as the code it's building!

Make is only a fundamental tool if that's what your library/binary uses. You may have a mix of CMake, MSVC and language specific build tools like Cargo and others. By your logic I should be an expert in all of them.

Make's support outside of the posix world isn't that great(as opposed to CMake) so calling it fundamental seems that you are making assumptions about the environments that development happens in.

>You may have a mix of CMake, MSVC and language specific build tools like Cargo and others. By your logic I should be an expert in all of them.

Correct.

>Make's support outside of the posix world

The world outside of posix doesn't really matter.

That's a pretty narrow world view you have then.

I think people write bad makefiles because the documentation is bad. Its "taking the user by the hand and pushing him into the right direction"-level is just not up to date anymore.

Make is a good tool because it allows a lot of flexibility, but it doesn't protect its users from the pitfalls this flexibility unavoidably creates.

Yes, but also it's make's fault -- it is possible to notice and complain if you write something that's not || safe, rather than just giving you a flaky build. (Cf. tup.)

Here here.

It’s hear hear.

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