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Comment by MarkPNeyer | Hacker News Reader

> this stuff took 2 years to evolve and a lot of people went through hours of frustration

GMake was first released in 1977: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_(software)

They've worked on this thing for decades

There are 42,000 issues filed for make. if you could resolve each of these issues in 10 minutes, you'd spend 291 days of frustration. http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=make

kids these days.

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_make_ was first released in 1977, but that was the PWB/UNIX version. The GNU variant of make didn't come along until sometime in the 1980's. It's hard to pin down the exact date of the first release because the developers didn't keep good records prior to the switch from RCS to CVS. However, the earliest ChangeLog entry now is dated July 15, 1988, and 1985 is the earliest date mentioned in any copyright statement in any of the GNU make source files.

My point was referring to the JS toolchain here mostly. I get that for C, make is the tool for the job.

make is a general-purpose tool for describing dependencies for regenerating files. It would be worth your while to learn make, and try it on your example. Understand that it's a declarative language ("A depends on B"; when "B" changes, here's how to update "A"), and not a scripting tool. This is a good thing.

In my experience, make is coupled to Unix. Make is not coupled to C.

On one hand, make typically comes with built-in rules for .c targets.

On the other hand, make can't cleanly handle #include dependency detection. I doubt that there is any major C project where "make extraclean" (or its equivalent) isn't occasionally necessary.

So yeah it's really not very well suited for C.

What is wrong wrong with just using the following.

Given it would be nice if make had a builtin macro to do this, but it is not too bad to type out.

depend: .depend

.depend: ${SRC} ${CC} -MM -I. ${SRC} > .depend.X && mv .depend.X .depend

include .depend

Makefile: .depend

Because now make can't build a clean source tree.

I believe make parses the entire Makefile before running it.

GNU make restarts when a Makefile: dependency changes. So it works perfectly fine. Try it ...

What happens if you list depend as a dependency of the first target?

Well, #include resolution would require that make be able to parse C, which would add a heck of a lot of complexity, and be unscalable. For instance, you'd need to modify make to parse CSS to teach it about @import, or to parse javascript to teach it about require() (but only if you're using RequireJS)

Or, you could use the C preprocessor option "-M" and its variants[0] to get it to generate make rules with C #include resolution for you.

See also Recursive Make Considered Harmful[1] for a good description on how to set up this in combination with GNU make's "include" facility to autogenerate your per-source #include resolution fragments.

[0] http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Preprocessor-Options.html

[1] http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf

In my experience, make is coupled to Unix. Make is not coupled to C.

However, implementations typically include magic that is heavily biased toward building C and C++ code. As someone who works on a lot of projects, some using those languages and some not, I tend to think it's rather too magical at times. Personally, I'd prefer to have that kind of magic explicitly stated in some standard file that comes with the tool, so that file can be included with a one-liner for those projects that want it but there is nothing implicit going on by default.

I think "magic" is much too loaded a way to characterize it.

The rule applicable to C pertains to building foo.o from foo.c. It amounts to two lines in a Makefile:

  %.o: %.c
          $(COMPILE.c) $(OUTPUT_OPTION) $<

where COMPILE.c and the other variable is predefined to trivial values.

There are other rules useful for C++, and for yacc, etc., but they are just as simple.

You can cancel all the implicit rules with "-r", or cancel selected implicit rules by naming them in the Makefile like this:

  %.o : %.c ;

All this is in the make manual, which is quite good: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Catalogue...

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