On reflection though, the timestamp dependant part isn't really something used much nowadays apart from compiling C.
It'd be cool if it was an opt-in feature for just files so that it could actually function as a replacement for make in all cases.
I went looking in the docs and found this[0] which I'd missed last time I looked into justfiles.
[0] https://github.com/casey/just?tab=readme-ov-file#what-are-th...
Make has its issues, but it also has two big advantages: it's simple and everyone already have it.
That said I kind of agree. I like the idea of `just` but it does seem like they have just created a complicated DSL.
I think it is better to just write your infra scripting in a real language. I generally use Deno or Rust itself and a thin wrapper that `cargo run`'s it. Using Rust eliminates a dependency.
Not even remotely. I know it might be hard to imagine if you only program on Linux/Mac but there's a whole world out there that isn't built on janky shell scripts and Makefiles. If you use C# or Java or Visual C++ or Qt on Windows it's pretty unlikely that you'd have Make. It's kind of a pain to install and you don't need it.
In fact, I didn't even know about .PHONY and have used make for a long time. That's what's great about it, even if you stick to the most basic features make is incredibly easy and straightforward. Dare I say, it "just" works lol.
I hate the proliferation of new tools that are the same as a tool that's been around for 20 years and is no different in any significant way except being trendy. Just unnecessary entropy. Our job is to manage and reduce, not maximize entropy.
>The explicit list of phony targets, written separately from the recipe definitions, also introduces the risk of accidentally defining a new non-phony target.
... seems to think the only way to define phony targets is:
.PHONY: foo bar
foo:
...
bar:
...
.PHONY: foo
foo:
...
.PHONY: bar
bar:
...
Not always, Go programmers for example often forget that they need C build-tools for their platform to get Make.
It's also just about the furthest thing from simple, the language is nasty so people just use it as an executor, which is a lot of tooling for such a simple use-case.