Yeah. As far as I can tell, most people complaining about Make, and building its replacements haven't figured out how to use Make, or bothered to read the manual. It's really not that complicated...
100% agreed. Half these comments make no sense and demonstrate a real ignorance of make. Please everyone read the manual and judge make for make, not autotools...
Yeah, I am currently learning make, and I feel kind of confused by a lot of comments: Either I really don't understand make, yet, or people really didn't understand that make is for building files from other files and handling the dependencies.
The problem is that as soon as you support multiple platforms, the exact same action of "building files from other files" can look fairly different. Since if you use make you want your readme to be: "cd folder; make -j" and since you don't want to write multiple entirely distinct set of makefiles for different platforms, this turns the makefiles in a hellish mess of special characters.
And all that just for executing a set of tasks in a DAG much slower than ninja
I usually reach for make because it’s simple to get a simple project built but once I start throwing stuff like source code generators at it then I have to spend a bunch of time getting the dependency tree right so I’m not chasing bugs I’ve already fixed but didn’t get recompiled. Or recompile the whole thing when I change some trivial thing.
Still, for the stuff I do, it gets the job done without too much trouble.
while make is simple, autotools is really complicated. However it's also very powerful and I've been in situations where cmake couldn't help me but autotools had solved the problem already.
