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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

Title is missing [2005] - was written 9-jul-2005 (doesn't say if edited since)

IMHO the most important edition since is djb "redo", which has since been implemented by apenwarr https://github.com/apenwarr/redo/ - It replaces make's dependency tracking with something significantly simpler and yet more reliable, and uses your familiar shell as a language to do that.

redo does NOT try to provide project management (especially not of the "cross platform" variety offered by cmake/tmake/qmake and friends). It leaves that for other tools (and rightly so, I believe).

Another important tool not listed: premake (v3 and v4, which are very different). If you're building a C++ centered project that needs to work on Windows, Xbox, Mac, Linux, PS3 and others - it will keep whatever is left of your sanity given the situation, and help you get the job done.

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Agreed.

After make based builds caused too much problems for us, we first moved to WAF (http://code.google.com/p/waf/), but it was too complex for our needs and extending builds with our own steps became a chore.

Then we moved to redo, which was a breeze of fresh air with it's simplicity. We build a few convenience scripts on top of it to allow easier management of build targets (OS X, iOS, iOS Simulator, Linux) and been happy since.

My problem with many modern build systems is that they try to cure the user of using shell commands for compiling and linking, in a misplaced effort to make things "more portable." They walk right by the real reason I'm there, which is to manage the complexity of the build and control compile times.

For projects simple enough to be manageable with those build systems, I'm already happily using make and a reasonably GNU environment (if not GNU's compiler.) For the other projects, where recursive makes and complexity becomes a distraction, I've already exceeded the parameters where these build systems are comfortable.

The acid test for me is MOSREF. MOSREF has a fairly portable ANSI C virtual machine and linker, but the compiler is metacircular and obviously nobody is going to target MOSREF for their packaged in recipes. One build system after another drove me to distraction trying to simplify MOSREF's process -- despite the fact that each step was quite simple, the order of steps was very tricky, especially when hacking on the compiler.

Redo looks like a better evolution away from Make for me, since it means no new syntax and it doesn't try to protect me from bash. Thanks for the recommendation -- I don't work much on MOSREF anymore, but maybe this offers an escape route from "go build", which has been a bit of pest for configuration management.

Inspired by redo, I've been writing a simple command-line tool set you could use to automatically generate and maintain a build system.

https://github.com/catenate/credo

redo is great; the basic build stuff is way easier, and the more complex dependency tracking stuff is at its worst no harder than make.

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