Learn Makefiles

A couple make flags that are useful and probably not very well known: Output synchronization which makes `make` print stdout/stderr only once a target finishes. Otherwise it's typically interleaved and hard to follow: make --output-sync=recurse -j10 On busy / multi-user systems, the `-j` flag for jobs may not be best. Instead you can also limit parallelism based on load average: make -j10 --load-average=10 Randomizing the order in which targets are scheduled. This is useful for your CI to harden your…

Rant incoming; I really don’t like Make for the common use-cases it is being used for in the modern day, such as the Golang ecosystem or in many cases: creating docker files. Make, at its core, is a tool that is meant to help you structure your dependencies for incrementally building things, but people use it as a glorified task runner simply due to the fact that it’s such a common build tool that it is nearly always installed if…

A far better way to learn about GNU make would be to read the actual manual. https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/ This doesn't seem like a well thought out introduction. There's quite a lot of randomness. For example, the first makefile says: This makefile will always run. The default target is some_binary, because it is first. some_binary: echo "nothing" Actually, it's not true that that will always echo nothing because some_binary isn't declared as phony and so if some_binary exists on the CWD echo…

Make is part of why I don't like C/C++. Other languages have proper package management. C doesn't encourage reuse like JS and Python and Nim and Rust and everything else does. It takes sometimes significant work to add a dependency and make it compile. The dependencies have their own dependencies. And their own build system. Which might not be the same one you're using.