Hacker News Reader

Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

I hate makefiles.

That said, I wholeheartedly agree with the comment.

It's sad that something so central to a project and so useful and important to so many people seems like it hasn't advanced ... ever.

Developers generally do the minimum with Makefiles and get out. They are similar to 1040 forms in popularity.

I've always had a dream of a redesigned "make" system... with import statements, object oriented rules, clear targets, rules and files clearly seperated, structure and organization... sigh.

View on HN

I can agree with your sentiment. I often sought alternatives for Make because some things are just missing. However I always end up with a Makefile because Make is just so basic and ubiquitous. Any big change or alternative to Make and you will loose that. That's why I try to ovoid newer Make features. So for me Make not advancing is actually a feature. As it is one of the few things I can depend on to stay the same.

I find Nix to be a really nice alternative to Make; although it's also quite heavyweight and "invasive" (it's not just self-contained binary like `make`), so it's more a case of "I'm already using Nix to install dependencies, why not use it for orchestration too?"

Bazel is pretty nice.

I will +1 that. I like Bazel a lot because it really forces you into a singular way of building a project which is clean and nice.

That said, mileage may vary. It was originally built by Google so it has quirks. I find it is best suited for projects with compiled dependencies and large repos.

Otherwise, I was going to add that Gradle as a build system is very advanced and improves upon make in many ways.

Bazel is great until you have to install tensorflow from source into a container and are sitting wondering why you have to put and configure a JVM inside a container-destined-to-be-static-binary, temporarily to get a python program with no Java bindings installed.

As I'm not the most intelligent developer, I'm sure there's a better, more sophisticated way to do this but I got really frustrated and gave up.

Why not use multiple stages in your docker file?

I'm sure bazel is a good tool when it is used properly, but as a greenhorn in the tech field, the constant version mismatching between bazel and tensorflow can become quite the pain when you have to build tensorflow from source.

Oh whoops, I basically wrote the same comment without reading yours. In any case, here here!

> It's awesome that something so popular is so well engineered that it doesn't need changes.

There, fixed it for you. In particular, I'm glad that the OO cancer hasn't spread to something as basic as a build system.

> Doesn't know how to write OO code. > Calls OO cancer.

What I meant in this respect is that a lot of makefile rules have a lot of commonality - it would be great to inherit a workhorse rule and tweak an option instead of having to copy/paste a rule or twiddle makefile variables (which aren't normal programming language variables)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com