These days, I would absolutely not use Make to compile code written in C, except for the smallest personal projects. It is just too fussy to construct the Makefile correctly, in a way that you can get correct incremental builds. Nearly any other build system is better at building projects written in C, in the sense that it is easy & straightforward to get your build system to do correct incremental builds.
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I personally use Xmake and try to advertise it every time I get the chance : FOSS, no DSL it's just Lua, dead simple yet featureful, and it is ninja fast, or at least claims to be I never bothered to check that out, it's fast enough for me.
Absolutely! Basically every company I've worked with over the last couple years as a contractor followed this methodology and it's grown to be my default runner as it's language agnostic.
I've found that to not matter that much these days - unless your projects is hundreds of thousands (or maybe millions even) of LOC, full builds are instant on modern machines.
any sizeable rust or c++ project is gonna take a while to compile in my experience? I tend to break things off into libraries that are faster to compile. Some of my coworkers don't like it but they learn to deal (c++)
These days, I would absolutely not use Make to compile code written in C, except for the smallest personal projects. It is just too fussy to construct the Makefile correctly, in a way that you can get correct incremental builds. Nearly any other build system is better at building projects written in C, in the sense that it is easy & straightforward to get your build system to do correct incremental builds.