Hacker News Reader

Comment by llukas | Hacker News Reader

This is excellent modern replacement for part where Makefiles get messy: https://github.com/casey/just

It replaces the "list of short shell-scripts" aspect of Make, but it doesn't replace the "only execute rules that need to be re-executed" part, which is the actually useful bit.

Sounds good. If it isn't broken, don't fix it.

This is the most frustrating bit of this weird recursive ecosystem of build tools. No one really uses all of make, so they only clone the bits they need, so their tool is simple and clean and beautiful to a subset of the community that has their same problem. But it can't replace make, so seven months later someone with a slightly different problem shows up with a make replacement, and the circle of life continues.

And you see this on the other side of the problem area too, where large and ugly tools like cmake are trying to do what older large and ugly software like autotools did, and trying to replace make. And they suck too.

I continue to believe the GNU make in the late 80's was and remains a better generic tool than everything in the modern world in all ways but syntax (and in many cases, again c.f. cmake, it had better syntax too). Had the original v7 syntax used something other than tabs, and understood that variable names longer than 1 byte were a good thing, we might never have found ourselves in this mess.

Or:

- Task (Go): https://github.com/go-task/task

- Cake (C#): https://github.com/cake-build/cake

- Rake (Ruby): https://github.com/ruby/rake

Or an entirely different concept: Makedown, as discussed on HN 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41825344

Or:

- SCons

https://scons.org/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCons

they do place themselves as an alternative to make, but imho they're entirely different and not at all comparable. make is centered around creating artefacts and not rebuilding what is already built. just is a command runner.

The main benefit I see with using Make as a command runner is that it's a standard tool that's installed "everywhere". Even though these replacements seem nicer to use, I never felt like they bring enough to the table to warrant having to install an extra tool.

Task* is another alternative, although I admittedly only use it with simple hobby projects in C so I can't speak to whether it scales well or not.

*https://taskfile.dev/

I also use just as a command runner, but I gotta agree with the others here that it should be described accurately as a command runner, while make is a build system.

There are some uses of make, especially by people who have never used it to build C/C++ projects, which makes more sense to replace with just. It doesn't have the baggage that make does, and they're not using it to actually make files. They also quite likely don't know the conventions (e.g. what a lot of us expect "make install" to do), and I support them in not learning the conventions of make—as long as they use something else. :)

Other uses of make will need other modern replacements, e.g. Cmake or Bazel.

It is possible that Kids These Days can say "no thanks" when someone tries to teach them make, and that the future of make is more along the lines of something us greybeards complain about. Back in _my_ day, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com