A Love Letter to Make

• just

  167 17,403 9.0 Rust

  🤖 Just a command runner

Man I love Make. But recently started a new job and we decided to use Just* and it's been fantastic. I doubt I would use Make again unless I was planning to use it as a real build system (which has been the minority use case of my use cases in the last 5 or so years).

* https://github.com/casey/just

• gRPC

  201 40,775 9.9 C++

  The C based gRPC (C++, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, PHP, C#)

  

You certainly can have tool-generated C# files, because the GRPC protobuf compiler does that and integrates it nicely into VS projects. It's not exactly what I'd call simple, though: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/src/csharp/Grpc.Too... so I'm not surprised that people don't try to spend days learning it and making it work.

One could probably write a "how to speak MSBuild for people who understand Make" page based on https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/msbuild/msbui... ; basically

Make -> MSBuild

Item : File (e.g. foo.c)

Target : Target (e.g. %.o:%.c)

(environment) variable : Property

tab-indented shell : Task (usually a C# assembly, although there's a generic "run command" one as well)

Free tip for anyone trying to debug MSBuild: https://msbuildlog.com/ . AFAIK there isn't anything quite as good for Make.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• Task

  113 10,055 9.6 MDX

  A task runner / simpler Make alternative written in Go

  

I could never get my head around Make except for very simple commands.

Was very recently looking for an alternative for automating frequently used commands for our Elixir app – especially for local dev (without using docker) and came across Taskfile (https://taskfile.dev/) and have been liking it quite a bit.

• fabricate

  1 131 10.0 Python

  The better build tool. Finds dependencies automatically for any language. (by brushtechnology)

  

My biggest disappointment with make, and almost all it’s clones, is that I have to manually write out pre-reqs and targets.

My computer knows what files I read and write. Use that to calculate what you should do.

Some systems head in this direction — there is “tup”, and a Python program I love called fabricate ( https://github.com/brushtechnology/fabricate ), that records what a program reads, then doesn’t rerun it if no input has changed.

• make-booster

  3 8 10.0 Makefile

  Utility routines to simplify using GNU make and Python

https://github.com/david-a-wheeler/make-booster

I think a lot of hate on make is due to poor use. If your makefile is complex, refactor it. Auto-generate dependencies (it only takes a few lines in GNU make). And don't use recursive make, that way lies madness. I also think GNU make is the wiser tool; POSIX make lacks too much in many cases.

• SaaSHub

  www.saashub.com featured

  SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

  

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