Hacker News Reader

Comment by holsta | Hacker News Reader

> A couple make flags that are useful [..]

But not portable. Please don't use them outside of your own non-distributable toy projects.

I will not restrict myself to an arcane subset of Make just because you refuse to type 'gmake' instead of 'make'. Parallel execution, pattern rules, order-only prerequisites, includes, not to mention the dozens of useful function like (not)dir, (pat)subst, info... There's a reason why most POSIX Makefiles nowadays are generated. It's not GNU's fault that POSIX is stale.

EDIT: There's one exception, and that would be using Guile as an extension language, as that is often not available. However, thanks to conditionals (also not in POSIX, of course), it can be used optionally. I once sped up a Windows build by an order of magnitude by implementing certain things in Guile instead of calling shell (which is notoriously slow on Windows).

Agreed. My company decided on using GNU Make on every platform we supported, which back then (last century) was a bunch of Unix variants, and Linux. That made it possible to write a simple and portable build system which could be used for everything we did, no hassle. And not difficult, because gmake was available basically everywhere, then just as now.

Completely agree. POSIX is irrelevant anyway. Every single unixlike has unique features that are vastly superior to whatever legacy happens to be standardized by POSIX. Avoiding their use leads to nothing but misery.

Portability is overrated. Better to make full use of one's tools. Restricting oneself to some "portable" subset of all features is pure masochism.

GNU Make is feature rich and is itself portable. It's also free software, as in freedom. Just use it.

And it's available everywhere. All Unix platforms had it back then, and the still existing ones (AIX is alive, at least) have it available. Which made it easy for our company to base our build system on GNU Make for everything, back in the day.

> Portability is overrated. > GNU Make is [..] itself portable.

Sounds like it's not overrated, then. You just prefer that other people write portable C and package GNU Make for all systems instead of you writing POSIX Make.

Not at all. I think we should all be using the full potential of our preferred system instead of sucky abstractions that provide the lowest common denominator of features.

Portability is overrated. Portability between POSIX systems is especially overrated. Linux and the BSDs have powerful exclusive features and people should be using them as much as possible in their software, simply because it's better than the legacy POSIX nonsense. This also applies to the features of Windows, macOS, iOS, etc.

GNU Make is powerful, ubiquitous and portable. That makes it even more pointless to avoid it. I won't claim it's perfect but it's absolutely a hell of a lot better than some "standard" POSIX variant of make that virtually nobody actually cares about. GNU Make will be present in pretty much every system capable of compiling software. Everyone is used to running make to build things. Avoiding things that make life easier because POSIX is pointless masochism.

Not only overrated, but also the source of extreme complex and gigantic pieces of software, which end being a nightmare to keep updated.

Just like optimization, it has its place and time.

People are too quick to [ab]use GNU Make features. IME, learning how to make do with portable make constructs can help discipline oneself to avoid excessive complexity, especially when it comes to macro definitions where GNU Make's Lispy looping and eval constructs are heavily overused and quickly lead to obtuse, impenetrable code. POSIX pattern substitutions are quite powerful and often produce easier to read code than the GNU equivalent. I'm not sure if computed variable names/nested variable references are well-defined in POSIX (e.g. "$($(FOO))"), but they are widely supported nonetheless, and often more readable than $(eval ...). (They can also be used for portable conditional constructs; I wouldn't argue they're more readable, though I often find them so.)

Some GNU Make constructs, like pattern rules, are indispensable in all but the simplest projects, but can also be overused.

For some reason there's a strong urge to programmatically generate build rules. But like with SQL queries, going beyond the parameterization already built into the language can be counter productive. A good Makefile, like a good SQL query, should be easy to read on its face. Yes, it often means greater verbosity and even repetition, but that can be a benefit to be embraced (at least embraced more than is instinctively common).

EDIT: Computed variable references are well-defined as of POSIX-2024, including (AFAICT) on the left-hand side of a definition. In the discussion it was shown the semantics were already supported by all extant implementations.

Absolutely. But the target has nothing to do with “portability” but a more fundamental and important principle(s) of readability and maintainability.

It's a matter of praxis. Targeting portable constructs is (IMO) a useful methodology for achieving the abstract goal. It doesn't have to be strict, but it provides a quantifiable, objective metric (i.e. amount of non-portable constructs employed) to help achieve an otherwise subjective goal.

Otherwise you face an ocean of choices that can be overwhelming, especially if you're not very experienced in the problem space. It's like the common refrain with C++: most developers settle on a subset of C++ to minimize code complexity; but which subset? (They can vary widely, across projects and time.) In the case of Make, you can just pick the POSIX and/or de facto portable subset as your target, avoiding alot of choice paralysis/anxiety (though you still face it when deciding when to break out of that box to leverage GNU extensions).

Unless you are actually targeting all of those platforms, of course. Which you're not.

exactly ! instead of writing portable Makefiles, use portable make !

The guide is basically about GNU Make, and the flags are obviously just for end users to invoke make.

Not every project has to be a multi-platform, multi-os, multi-language monster. It is perfectly fine to target a specific set of architecture, os, etc. And I find insulting and silly calling it a “toy project”

Agreed if you're looking at it through the lens of portable software that you plan to distribute. Automake generates portable Makefiles for a reason.

But there's another huge category: people who are automating something that's not open-source. Maybe it stays within the walls of their company, where it's totally fine to say "build machines will always be Ubuntu" or whatever other environment their company prefers.

GNU Make has a ton of powerful features, and it makes sense to take advantage of them if you know that GNU Make will always be the one you use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com