Comment by shadowmint | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shadowmint | Hacker News Reader

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Really?

There are a lot of people who use makefiles for C projects, but most of those people don't write them by hand.

They use a frontend that generates a vastly complex and arcane makefile using either automake, cmake, qmake, etc.

These makefiles are utterly unmaintainable and deserve a place next to 'goto' in the section labeled 'considered harmful'... but they serve a purpose; correctly collecting build settings, templates and metadata and using those to construct the correct makefile.

That doesn't count as 'using make'.

There are a vanishingly few projects that actually use make; google for it's NDK builds (and a few other things; but these are massive recursive makefile monsters that you have a tiny safe api to work with), LUA with its 15 makefiles, one for each platform. There are a couple of other examples, but not many. I can't think of any big ones off the top of my head.

I think we can safely say that writing a Makefile to build your C code is a bad idea.

Linux kernel? Uses its own automation. See also *BSD make, which is the basis for ports among other things (unless that's changed since last I looked); entirely in-make. Plan 9 and the userspace port uses mk, which is a slightly cleaned up variant of the BSD make.

Fact is, a makefile for building C code is typically smaller than the autoconf files required to get autotools to work on the same code. Most horrible makefiles are written by terrible build automation software (autotools being among the worst offenders here) or by people who don't understand the dependency graph model. A ten line Makefile that automated something repetitive is fantastically important, even if it is just writing down something in an executable fashion such that you don't have to remember it later. Almost every build automation tool out there either doesn't scale up (too simple) or is too hard for small work, or occasionally both, like Ant.

If I need to do something simple, a Makefile is only a very little bit more complex than a command line—I frequently crib the command I just ran to start off the Makefile. If I needed to do nontrivial logic in a Makefile and couldn't avoid it, I wouldn't use jam or tup or redo or SCons—I couldn't, because they're less useful than make! I would probably end up using Rake, which is the only build automation tool I've seen so far that isn't a make clone and can do implicit dependency generation.

> I think we can safely say that writing a Makefile to build your C code is a bad idea.

I don't think that's a safe assumption at all, I think that's a dangerous overgeneralization. You're only considering open-source projects... and as you point out, both NDK and Lua (projects in the embedded space) use Make. I would not be surprised to find hordes of non-OSS embedded developers using Make natively precisely _because_ it is the "assembler" of build systems.

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