Comment by gosub100 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gosub100 | Hacker News Reader

I say this as someone with 20+ years of experience in C and C++: Using make is a huge waste of time in 2023 (and forward). Learning the intricacies of make actively blocks you from Getting Things Done.

Yeah, make is kind of neat because it has this functional what_I_want : how_to_get_it syntax, but it doesn't actually work that way. It's a huge waste of time to try to get it working so unless you meet the following caveats, make is not for you:

- you love trivia like "who was the 19th president of the US?"

- on a road trip, you stop to look at historical markers

- you love steampunk/tube amplifiers/making pasta from scratch/listening on vinyl/home brewing beer

If those sound like you, you're the type who won't regret wasting a couple days getting make running and getting cut on the sharp edges. Most of us who just want to get there will be better with cmake, meson, or hand-rolling a script using a modern language (inb4 "make does more than compile code" - yeah, so does ruby or python or any other script, without making false promises or wasting your time)

3 paragraphs of rambling for "make is a waste of time because of sharp edges"

Can you actually articulate what those sharp edges are?

yes, I can

If meson fits your project it's worth using it - it could turn into a straightjacket later but changing to something else isn't the end of the world if it cost little effort to implement it in the first place.

As for trying to use a "modern" language to write scripts.......well if they're not declarative and don't understand dependencies then how can they be better?

make is no paragon - it just contains solutions to lots of problems that exist in build systems. The fact that those problems exist and make has ways to solve them isn't make's fault. Everyone might perhaps want builds to "just work" so they can ignore them and such people write scripts and use the concept of "rebuild and clean" a lot and it works until the build gets big and slow.

"modern" tools get written with many simplifying assumptions and become slowly complicated as they hit all the problems make hit long ago and try to find ways to solve them.

> if they're not declarative and don't understand dependencies then how can they be better?

They are both a wash: you're spinning your gears trying to get a simple task done. My claim is that you might as well do it in python instead of wade through the cesspool of hidden rules or try to debug why your makefile silently fails. It's the same amount of time spent, you might as well check the date stamp in python and rebuild the source if it's newer than the output. They both suck, might as well suck in a modern language than trial by fire with make.

Oh, I think that's OFTEN true. When your build gets big though - when you're building multiple packages for example of which most are not yours - the benefits can start to become more worthwhile.

I currently work with people who think a huge build.sh is the way to go - so the build does a lot of unnecessary things just to be sure they are uptodate and it's slow. It's still not bad enough to kick up a fuss but it's going that way.

"Make actively blocks you from Getting Things Done." --Quote from someone suggesting CMake.

Lost me at "making past from scratch".

In some sense, don't we all make the past from scratch? [stares into middle distance]

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