cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/42598837
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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Make was created for building code, but many people are also using it as a command runner.
Just addresses that use case, but it's not a replacement for either of those makes.
If you want a really advanced build system there's shake, which can deal with things like building things that generates dependency information for things that build things. In a nutshell: It's strictly more powerful than make because (a single invocation of) make operates on a fixed dependency graph while shake can discover dependencies as it goes.
Mostly though you should use whatever comes with the language you're using, and if you're doing something simple use make. That includes "link a multi-language project where the components are generated by language-specific systems". It notably doesn't include multi-stage compiler builds. GHC switched from recursive make, which is a bad idea, to non-recursive make, which was... arcane, but at least you didn't have to
make cleanto get a correct build, to shake. Here's the build system it's a whole project to itself.