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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

I agree. Also a lot of the replacements are focused on one language rather than being a generic "do stuff" tool like Make.

The fact that Make can't even do subdirectories sanely is kind of ridiculous.

Does anyone know of anything better than Make? There's Ninja but it's not designed to be written by hand.

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I think just[1] is a good generic "do stuff" tool

[1] https://github.com/casey/just

It's not a build system though. I mean a generic build system like Make, but without some of the terrible design decisions.

there is also gn[1]. It doesn't seem to be very popular, but feels good in my experience.

[1] https://gn.googlesource.com/gn

Isn't that only used by Chrome?

Have you taken a look at using Nix as a build system? One thing I don't like about most build systems is the lack of a dependency check, C is most guilty of being the troublemaker here. But anyways, with Nix you can lock in dependencies and handle arbitrary feature flags and platforms as well.

Though it's possible this goes beyond your "just do stuff"

> Does anyone know of anything better than Make?

Xmake https://xmake.io/ for C and C++ (I haven't use that for anything serious yet) and Buck 2 https://buck2.build/ if you need a really complex build system. Both of these do caching of build artifacts and can do distributed builds (with less and more complex setup).

Yeah I've been following Buck2. Definitely interesting.

Xmake looks interesting too (even though I hate Lua). I wonder why it isn't more popular - I don't think I've seen a single project use it.

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