I recently rewrote the build sys­tem for Pola from ant to GNU make. Keep­ing things in ant was get­ting to be too much work, try­ing to be proper and writ­ing tasks (in Java) rather than just using the shell. I was ini­tially a little wor­ried about how much work it would be to redo the build sys­tem, but I was pleas­antly reminded by how simple it is. It took prob­ably about a quarter the amount of time to rewrite the entire build sys­tem from scratch in make than it would have taken to do a little incre­mental change to the ant sys­tem. As a bonus I man­aged to clean up the pro­ject a lot, redu­cing the build sys­tem down to just two files of a com­bined 70 lines.

I briefly skimmed through other build sys­tem, cmake, SCons, even cabal, but for all the talk of sim­pli­fic­a­tion and port­ab­il­ity, they don’t seem to offer enough over make to get rid of it. Maybe I’m too cor­rup­ted by the Unix way of doing things, but build­ing soft­ware, for me, always boils down to a few shell com­mands with a bit of depend­ency hand­ling, which is pretty much the defin­i­tion of make. If a build sys­tem uses any­thing other than the shell as its “nat­ive lan­guage” I end up fight­ing with it.

On the port­ab­il­ity side of things, I would prob­ably look at this issue dif­fer­ently if I were build­ing lib­rar­ies instead of just execut­ables and doc­u­ment­a­tion, but I’ve never seen port­ab­il­ity to Win­dows (for instance) as such a com­pel­ling win that it strikes me as a bet­ter solu­tion than just installing cyg­win.

I recently rewrote the build system for Pola from ant to GNU make. Keeping things in ant was getting to be too much work, trying to be proper and writing tasks (in Java) rather than just using the shell. I was initially a little worried about how much work it would be to redo ...