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Discussion on: Better Builds with Make: A Beginner's Guide

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Patrick Elsen

Some recommendations from me:

  • If you just want to run some simple commands, using just is a good alternative to make.
  • If you want to do anything complicated, I would recommend looking into a proper build system generator such as CMake, Meson. Make tends to be somewhat fragile as complexity grows.

I think that Make is incredible given how conceptually simple it is, but it is easy to hit it's limits. When you have massive Makefiles, you can also run into bottlenecks, which is why a lot of projects these days use Ninja instead, which does the same thing as Make (rebuild only stuff where the input files changed) but the file format is designed to be machine-generatable (by a build system generator such as CMake) and it is blazing fast.