> Once you try to build anything beyond a toy, it quickly becomes chaos.
Of course the chaos is not caused by, "very hypotheticaly" let's say, a compiler or maybe a language without modules.
How would you estimate that ? 20%, 40%, or 70%, true ?
Of course the chaos is not caused by, "very hypotheticaly" let's say, a compiler or maybe a language without modules.
How would you estimate that ? 20%, 40%, or 70%, true ?
Its just that in some languages and build systems (Node, Maven), we have abstracted this away by calling them plugins and they probably come from the same group that made the library you need.
No such pluginsystem exists, as far as I am aware, for makefiles.
There aren't many widely used build systems that can handle such dynamic dependencies without some special "magic" for these, the only one that I know of (with a significant number of users, so not Shake) is Buck 2 (Bazel and all C++ build systems use "special magic", you can't write in user rules).
So what's the problem exactly? https://mmottl.github.io/ocaml-makefile/
Oh look, it even builds a project faster than Dune: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/dune-build-vs-makefile/11394
They all have the samé problem: that you don't know the name (or even the number) of modules (module files) being generated without reading the source. And as a bonus every compiler uses a sligthly different naming scheme for the generated module file (this is of course no problem for OCaml ;).
As an example (using Fortran). File `test.f90`:
module first
contains
subroutine hello ()
end subroutine hello
end module first
module second
contains
subroutine world ()
end subroutine world
end module second
-rw-r--r-- 1 roland staff 221 Sep 21 19:07 first.mod
-rw-r--r-- 1 roland staff 225 Sep 21 19:07 second.mod
-rw-r--r-- 1 roland staff 185 Sep 21 19:07 test.f90
-rw-r--r-- 1 roland staff 672 Sep 21 19:08 test.oI've successfully written Makefiles for Fortran and they worked with ifort/ifx and gfort. In my experiments I've also made GNU Cobol, GNU Modula-2 and Vishap Oberon fit within the Makefile paradigm without much trouble. You have failed to provide reasons as to why those languages in particular (or more likely any language that's not of C heritage) can't be used with Makefiles. For instance, you can definitely couple OCaml with Makefiles, just use ocamlopt and treat .cmx files as object files, generated beforehand by ocamlopt -c (like you'd do with GCC). I am not familiar with C++ modules and as such I didn't experiment with them.
Did the samé (I'm not sure if gfortran did exist at all at the time, I guess it had been g95), plus they worked with Absoft, PGI and Pathscale too (yes, that has been some time ago). And it was a great PITA. Not the least because at the time no Fortran compiler did generate the dependency description, so you either had to parse the Fortran sources by yourself or use makedepf90, which didn't work with all sources.
> You have failed to provide reasons as to why those languages in particular [...] can't be used with Makefiles.
I have obviously badly worded that. I didn't mean it is impossible, just that is a great PITA.
> I am not familiar with C++ modules and as such I didn't experiment with them.
They have the same problem, you don't know the name of the module that is going to be produced.