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Comment by rewmie | Hacker News Reader

I found it amusing how the main features advertised for Task were the programming language used to write it, how it's distributed as a single executable, and how it's easy to install.

None of them are relevant, or made any case for using it instead of just using the thing described in an international standard that is shipped by default in UNIX and Unix-like OSes for decades.

It's like their selling point is to talk crap about other tools without making any case for their own offering.

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UNIX might be standard but it doesn't make it cross platform. You might not like it but a lot of people develop on windows. Build tools that assume a unix environment is present aren't a solution.

> UNIX might be standard but it doesn't make it cross platform. You might not like it but a lot of people develop on windows.

I fail to understand what point you tried to make. There are already plenty of Make implementations for Windows. If you think that installing a third party tool like Task is ok, I don't see how doing the same with a Make implementation would exclude it as a valid alternative.

I don't think using Task is better either. I was just replying to OP saying to just use unix tools. Unix tools aren't cross platform so they aren't a good build tool either.

> Unix tools aren't cross platform (...)

I just pointed out there are Make implementations for Windows.

And I'm not even mentioning WSL or MinGW.

I don't know what else to say.

Posix is cross platform. There's a reason it's easy to build stuff on mac os, free bsd and linux.

Just because Windows decided to do everything differently to Unix and you decided to use Windows doesn't mean everything else has to adapt to be "cross platform".

FWIW, GNU Make runs fine in Windows if you're allergic to WSL

> Build tools that assume a unix environment is present aren't a solution.

Ut is a solution for the vast majority of cases. Even most Windows environments use WSL.

nmake has been part of MS Visual Studio and former incarnations such as MSVC since basically forever (1988?). And while the shell language recognized by command.com limits nmake's usefulness, tar and curl have been added to standard Win installations only recently.

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