Hacker News Reader

Comment by smlckz | Hacker News Reader

> Any sufficiently complicated static blog generator contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of make.

> -- Someone who has made a static blog generator

That seems to be true. I think I am gonna try that myself.

View on HN

Make itself has a race-condition (bug) built into its design, and its shell language is very ad-hoc. In particular, conditionals in Make are a mystery I'm afraid I'll never understand. Each time I end up having to write a normal shell script and call it from Make. You're not necessarily making your life better by switching to Make.

My static site generator builds the whole site from scratch every time, no caching of results, no caching bugs. It's instant and I use normal shell scripts, so I don't have to deal with Make's oddities.

Oh! Let us not forget that Make is basically just a Prolog with (not so) weird syntax. You just need to learn a little bit of logic programming. After that we have our stat(2) :-)

> Make itself has a race-condition (bug) built into its design

Could you elucidate? I’m very comfortable with Make, and I can’t think what you might be referring to, unless you mean the way it uses mtimes for freshness, which isn’t a bug for any correct Make script. (And for incorrect Make scripts, there are vastly easier ways of making it do the wrong thing than ones driven by mtime coarseness.)

6 years into writing my own kind of SSC, based entirely on make.

AMA ;-)

You're going to try implementing half of make?

Sounds fun, actually.

Yeah, we need to make make popular again, to prevent more SSGs and build tools… Maybe rewrite-it-in-rust(tm) without changing the syntax would do the trick.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com