Just curious, as I am a fan of simple Makefiles, what benefits did you encounter moving from Make -> Just -> Mise?
Just has a lot of UI/UX improvements over Make, like a way to list available recipes, convenient ways to define command-line parameters to recipes, consistent and easy syntax, and a whole lot of predefined functions and variables to cover common use cases like finding the number of CPUs on the current system, manipulate strings, etc. It doesn't do things that Make can't do, because Make can do anything a shell script can if you don't mind wrestling it into submission. It just does those things much more easily.
But it still has a few warts. Recipes look a lot like a shell script, but they're evaluated separately line-by-line, so you can't set a variable on one line and then read it in another. There are workarounds, but that's the default behavior. And a lot of the time when I'd want a task runner, I also want an environment manager (like uv or cargo or node/npm), so bundling those together matches my workflow better than managing those separately.
I have zero bad to say about Just. It's freaking awesome. If Mise disappeared, I'd go back to using Just. I just prefer Mise right now.
Make and Bazel already exist. Just and Mise and other options don’t need to reinvent that wheel. My last employer used Bazel and I liked using Mise as a wrapper around it so that `mise test` invoked the complex command line to run all the tests, kind of like a set of shell aliases that only affect that one repo.
Simply because for most developers it was faster to just whip up a bash script than to modify the Makefile and understand why their change did not do what they expected it to do. Hell, i've been dabbling in Makefiles for at least 25 years and still have to look up the weird mapping expressions when for some reason there's the "nothing to be done" or "No rule to make target `xxx'".
Its only killer feature is that it's everywhere, ready to be used by any brand new developer without any work. While "Mise", Just or many of the other replacements need stuff installed and/or setup.
they're literally just bash scripts so you don't need mise to run them. I've heard several users have setups where they have people with and without mise running them.
And until recently-ish, there wasn’t a great alternative that let end users run the equivalent of `make build && make test`, but without using Make. That’s why so many people abused it so: it seemed so close to being handy and convenient. And then someone comes along and runs `touch test` and `make test` doesn’t run tests anymore because no one knew they had to label that target as PHONY.
That’s the kind of stuff that got me all-in on Just from the beginning. It “feels” kind of like Make in the nice ways, but optimized for scripting instead of for building C projects. What a breath of fresh air! And as mentioned elsewhere, for me, Mise came along right behind it and gave us do-everything tool that’s nearly ideal for the kinds of non-C projects I work on now in Rust, Python, and TypeScript.
Just is a task runner, doesn’t do file dependencies / “derived files”
Make is the exact opposite. It’s completely based on files, and their derivatives.
Make will (well should) skip already compiled files, speeding up compilation if you’ve only changed 1 of 100000 file into ann object instead of waiting an hour, and go straight to linking.
Just is nice. But they are two different tools, that just happen to share the fact that they have some sort of dependency tree.
The tooling is 40 years old. It’s been long over due, but it’s ubiquitous.
Had been using make for simple tasks for ~8 years and just got tired of how limiting it is.