Menu
I've been using make and makefiles for many many years, and although the concept is sound, the implementation has something to be desired.
Has anyone found any good alternatives to make that don't overcomplicate the problem?
446
The best alternative is GNU Make, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like CMake are Premake, Maven, SCons and Gradle. CMake is a family of tools designed to build, test and package software.
Make (or rather a Makefile) is a buildsystem - it drives the compiler and other build tools to build your code. CMake is a generator of buildsystems. It can produce Makefiles, it can produce Ninja build files, it can produce KDEvelop or Xcode projects, it can produce Visual Studio solutions.
CMake handles the difficult aspects of building software such as cross-platform builds, system introspection, and user customized builds, in a simple manner that allows users to easily tailor builds for complex hardware and software systems.
check out SCons. For example Doom 3 and Blender make uses of it.
77
I have a lot of friends who swear by CMake for cross-platform development:
http://www.cmake.org/
It's the build system used for VTK (among other things), which is a C++ library with cross-platform Python, Tcl, and Java bindings. I think it's probably the least complicated thing you'll find with that many capabilities.
You could always try the standard autotools. Automake files are pretty easy to put together if you're only running on Unix and if you stick to C/C++. Integration is more complicated, and autotools is far from the simplest system ever.
25
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
