Comment by PittleyDunkin
Comment by PittleyDunkin 5 days ago
Man, we've seen so many replacements for make over the past two decades. Make is gonna be a really, really hard tool to unseat: it's small, it's reliable, it's pretty cross-platform, it solves a narrowly-defined problem well, and it seems like 95% of what people want is a slightly different syntax or interface.
Meanwhile, I am never going to abandon a working tool that does what it says on the tin for something users have to go out of their way to install without a really good reason. .PHONY hasn't bothered me in decades. It's a reasonable hack, imo.
Make hits a really, really sweet spot of addressing a hard problem with a simple, understandable interface. It's not too large, it's not too small, it just does one thing really, really well.
Getting make to work on Windows (a hard requirement from OP) the same way as on Linux is basically impossible. If you only live in the Linux/Unix world than make is more than enough, I agree.