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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

If you are on a unix system, "redo" (designed by djb and implemented by apenwarr) is excellent. It's refreshingly simple and robust.

And, there's a minimalist version called "do" which is a hundred-or-so lines of shell, that does a complete rebuild (no dependency tracking) - so you can package that with your project, and not have to worry about your users having to install yet another build system.

Other alternatives I'd recommend, with some degree of success:

SCons - cross platform, but slow (every big enough project eventually abandons it)

waf - a unix-only (AFAIK) SCons derivative that's a bit more limited, but much faster

CMake - cross platform, very complete, on par with Make on every level (including ugliness and complexity)

Premake - cross platform, makes IDE file but can also write makefiles for you.

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I'm also writing a redo-inspired build tool, but less devoted to djb's vision, and more intent on taking advantage of some nice features of Inferno/Plan 9. For example, the /env filesystem allows dependencies on environment variables. The <{} syntax allows parallelism while grouping output.

In a nutshell, credo tries to advance the build-tool state of the art, by replacing *ake files with shell-scriptable commands to build a system from bits of library code. More at http://github.com/catenate/credo See especially the first literate test, which has a more complete introduction.

waf is cross-platform (Python) https://code.google.com/p/waf/

I don't know if waf is really faster than other alternatives, but having used waf in production, I can safely say that deploying waf is at best hellish. A single-file script with zipimported package that extracts itself to a world-writable hidden directory? Crazy.

For Unix-only and smaller projects another great option is fabricate.py

Another vote for Fabricate; here's a comment of mine from a while back explaining in detail why I prefer it (or Tup) to Make.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4190804

I use it on Windows too with an strace replacement I wrote which isn't online but if anyone's interested then just ask.

Thanks for the tip on fabricate, it appears to be just the tool I was looking for. A light weight dependency based "build" system in python that is not focused on distutils or making python packages. We shall see how well it works for data processing.

'Drake' for that use was on here too, not too long ago. http://blog.factual.com/introducing-drake-a-kind-of-make-for...

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