The Quest to the Perfect Makefile

This is a good rundown of GNU Make capabilities. Be careful about relying on things like pkg-config to auto-discover dependencies, since distros changing things will permanently break the entire history of your project. Then you can't git bisect and have to use things like Docker to go back and examine old versions.

Here's a Makefile I put together recently that builds over 9000 objects, 72 libraries, and a few hundred executables. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/Makefile The interesting part I've noticed is tuning the makefile so it correctly orders linker arguments, making sure the relationships between granular libraries is a DAG, and being able to build individual targets without building the world. GNU Make probably makes this easier than any other tool, since it's secretly a functional programming language. Which is something that might frighten the uninitiated.