These days, I would absolutely not use Make to compile code written in C, except for the smallest personal projects. It is just too fussy to construct the Makefile correctly, in a way that you can get correct incremental builds. Nearly any other build system is better at building projects written in C, in the sense that it is easy & straightforward to get your build system to do correct incremental builds.
I've found that to not matter that much these days - unless your projects is hundreds of thousands (or maybe millions even) of LOC, full builds are instant on modern machines.
- Most C++ or Rust projects
- Medium size or larger C projects
- Anything which is built with tools written in JavaScript (due to Node startup time overhead)
Stuff where a full build is close enough to instant:
- Most Java, C#, Go projects
- Small C projects
- Tiny/trivial C++ or Rust programs, or C++ programs written for embedded systems
This is just my experience. YMMV.
Yes, exactly. Incremental compilation! This is what Make is not good at.