GNU Make

“it is portable already and does not add yet another host dependency on everybody”

“it's great for smaller ones, but for the huge ones, there are much better runners available”

“Graph-based programming environments like make and Spring also free developers from having to worry about what order things have to be done in which can get really cumbersome”

“it's sure nice to just be able to type `make` and see a pdf pop out”

“bash, xargs, wget, make, etc are well-understood, well-maintained tools”

“One of those things that is useful both when you are working on the project and when you later return to it”

“Make has long been my go-to script runner and build tool, simple and ubiquitous”

“Make is sufficiently bad that everyone who has used it has considered writing a better way to do it.”

“Make suffers from unfamiliar and somewhat unorthodox syntax, and inconsistent language design”

“Make suffers from unfamiliar and somewhat unorthodox syntax, and inconsistent language design.”

“Anyone who's struggled over a complex Makefile wishes they had a more sane declarative language!”

“What started as a simple fix for the quirks of traditional build systems like make”

“GNU Make has a debugger. This alone makes it far superior to every other build tool I've ever seen.”

“For toy projects good old Make is fine...but at some point a project gets large enough that you need something more powerful”

“It's wonderful to have the same build, test, release commands in all projects”

“Works like a charm (and never messes up incremental builds by not rebuilding on a header-only change).”

“I have written once a set of GNU Makefiles, according to its manual, around 1998, and I have never had to change them since then”

“Make is timestamp based. That is a thoroughly out-of-date approach only suitable for a single computer.”

“Let me introduce you to a few of my friends: Make, Task, Dagu, Windmill, Rivet, Inngest”

“many of them lack some of the basic features that 'make' has had for half a century”

“I am pretty sure that GNU Make with Makefile is still lighter than CMake”

“Make is ubiquitous, cross-platform, the targets are essentially snippets of shell with some additional features/syntax added on top”

“using Make will allow for a less flaky CI experience, that doesn't break the next time the git hoster changes something”

“To me the Python code is more verbose and not as simple compared to the Makefile's target so it is less readable as well.”

“I recommend just putting a Makefile in the repo and have that have CI targets”

“They work great for simple tasks, but as a developer, I hated having my logic trapped in a GUI”

“Robust security against agent actions going haywire can be achieved via command runners like just or make”

“It is nice, but I am currently dropping all make/meson/cmake/etc based build systems”

“fighting cmake/make/autoconf/configure/automake build spaghetti is not my idea of a good time”

“treat the FPGA tools as command line tools that are invoked by running make”

“IMHO, Make makes a decent glue system at smaller organizations lacking a compiler/build/tooling team.”

“I don't want to .. but people keep using it because it's simpler than other build systems.”

“Having Make shell out to the real build system is a nice compromise.”

“make and CMake work perfect right up until they don't and the last 2% cost you 98% of the time.”

“make and CMake work perfect right up until they don't and the last 2% cost you 98% of the time”

“I just finished writing a nicely recursive set of gMake for cloud a pipeline”

“you can use a makefile and distribution-provided dependencies, or vendored dependencies, and you don't need cmake”

“We'd have been a lot further along if tools like make had ever adopted hashes for freshness checking rather than timestamps”

“once the Makefile is written I'm not going to be constantly adding and removing packages on a frequent basis”

“It's true for any C/C++ project which bothers to write 10 lines of GNU `make` code.”