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You could, but the you lose most of make's benefits, this way you are only using make as a script bundle. Looking back now it does align with what the article is proposing. But I still a bit annoyed that we don't get proper use of Makefiles, and that we need to reinvent incremental building for every tool

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same problem in Java

Using make but don't have any artifact and dependency is just choosing the wrong tool for the job. It's the whole point of the tool.

In my previous job, I used Make for my asset pipeline and compilation of javascript.

At some point, I discovered esbuild and realised that I had to split the file in two for tasks that had to be done sequentially and those that could be done in parallel.

Esbuild still had dependencies, but needed to be run only once for those dependencies.

Still got great results ultimately. Going from something like a minute to four seconds.

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