Ask HN: Any Good Make Alternatives?

by Datenstrom on 5/28/2022, 4:43:00 PM with 16 comments
I'm starting a new greenfield personal project which is a great time to try something new. Are there any new Make alternatives that I should try for building a multi-language, monorepo project that also has a number of Linux system dependencies?

For some context the languages will definitely be Python and Julia, with possibly Rust, C/C++, and CUDA. I'll likely be using poetry or conda for managing Python and there are also a good number of system dependencies that will need to be installed on a Linux box.

  • by bediger4000 on 5/28/2022, 5:05:53 PM

    Why have all the previous Make alternatives failed to get traction?

    I mean, ant, gradle, maven, imake, there's probably others... all have had their moment as the "It Girl" of builds, and then seemed to wither away. What's up with that?

  • by ChrisRackauckas on 5/30/2022, 12:38:29 AM

    For Julia the reproducibility is rather straightforward. You just stick a Project.toml/Manifest.toml in there and you'll always get the same package versions. Keeping the non-Julia dependencies together will be the hard part though.

  • by leephillips on 5/28/2022, 6:06:14 PM

    Why do you seek an alternative to Make? It does the job, brilliantly. I’m not a fan of the syntax, however, especially the need for tabs. Is that your main concern?

  • by bradwood on 5/28/2022, 4:45:50 PM

    https://github.com/casey/just

  • by pid-1 on 5/28/2022, 5:51:11 PM

    I've been using VSCode + .devcontainer with great success.

    I've also tried Nix recently, but couldn't grok it.

  • by muxneo on 5/28/2022, 4:45:29 PM

    I guess ninja could be a good alternative

  • by yuppie_scum on 5/28/2022, 5:00:52 PM

    Dockerfile