Fed up with Make. Is there a better way?
As the title says I've had it with Make.
As my homebrew projects have grown over the years I've found myself stringing together dozens of little custom converters, utilities and assemblers into these fragile monolithic Makefiles, typically with data and code being baked in fifteen different ways with dependencies going left and right before finally producing some output image.
Not to mention all of the little peculiarities of the language, or at least of GNU Make on Windows. Why can't I have a hash mark within a quoted variable definition? Why does a parallel build freak over rules with multiple targets? And who's bright idea was it to use tabs to identify commands anyway?
I'm not expecting any other tool to remove my dependencies for me, but surely there must be a better language out there for expressing this sort of thing?
Note that I have little interest in trying to manage builds for a hundred and three different environments. Furthermore I'm looking for a small standalone executable that I can painlessly package together with my code and other tools to send to artists and such, not something that needs a gazillion other utilities or some "run-time" installed.
Hopefully I'm not asking the obvious, but you already said you're on windows, so why can't you use Visual Studio Express edition?
Quote:Original post by cache_hitI do use Visual Studio for C++ development. However I mostly use Make for cross-compiling homebrew projects (e.g. my current project is a C64 game.)
Hopefully I'm not asking the obvious, but you already said you're on windows, so why on earth can't you use Visual Studio Express edition?
Still... Wouldn't I have to resort to some external Make-like utility when baking data in intricate ways for any platform?
Quote:Original post by bubu LV
Waf
Quote:Original post by Hyrcan
I am quite happy with SCons.
Thank you. I'll check those out.
Quote:Original post by implicitQuote:Original post by cache_hitI do use Visual Studio for C++ development. However I mostly use Make for cross-compiling homebrew projects (e.g. current project is a C64 game.)
Hopefully I'm not asking the obvious, but you already said you're on windows, so why on earth can't you use Visual Studio Express edition?
Still... Wouldn't I have to resort to some external Make-like utility when baking data in intricate ways for any platform?
Ahh gotcha, didn't realize there was cross-compiling going on.
Have you considered CMake? It's a script system built on top of make (and visual studio, for that matter) that sits at a higher level and generates makefiles, visual studio projects, etc automatically.
Quote:Original post by cache_hit++ for CMake. I use it to compile on Mac/Windows/Linux, and I have had considerably less trouble than with automake/scons/etc. For the most part, CMake's ability to generate Visual Studio/XCode projects allows much better integration with native tools.
Have you considered CMake? It's a script system built on top of make (and visual studio, for that matter) that sits at a higher level and generates makefiles, visual studio projects, etc automatically.
Quote:Original post by cache_hitNot really. It seemed geared towards solving a different problem from the one I am having. That is smoothly compiling C projects on multiple platforms as opposed to assembling code for a very specific machine and massaging data in byzantine ways (not to mention that the ten-megabyte installer kind of put me off.)
Have you considered CMake? It's a script system built on top of make (and visual studio, for that matter) that sits at a higher level and generates makefiles, visual studio projects, etc automatically.
But perhaps it's worth taking a second look?
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