The Joys Of Data-Driven Programming

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Monday, August 22, 2016 at 12:21:36 AM UTC+12, Chris Angelico wrote:
> The issues with makefiles are mainly to do with metaprogramming (plus
> a few specific issues with the format itself, which don't apply to the
> more general concept). There's a ton of magic to cope with makefiles
> that try to rebuild themselves, plus all the extra tooling around the
> outside (configure scripts etc), to try to move to a meta-level above
> the makefile and thus enable metaprogramming of makefile contents.

In other words, the limitations of the original Make concept itself. So you fix this by
a) As per Lampson, adding another level of indirection (e.g. GNU Autotools, CMake)
b) Trying to replace Make altogether (e.g. SCons, Jam, Ant/Maven/Gradle)

Which approach is enjoying more success? I seem to be coming across CMake a lot. It is popular because it can wrap, not just around Make, but other build systems as well, including platform-specific IDE-based ones like Microsoft Visual Studio and Apple XCode. In other words, it is a cross-platform build system.