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Make was never a tool that I was in love with and over the years I've used Ant quite a lot but Ant is pretty geared toward Java, just as several other tools (Grunt, Rake, etc.) are all about some other language and tool stack.

Is there a modern tool that is:

a) cross-platform

b) pretty language agnostic

c) easy to use

for all the automated tasks that developers want to do, but with a more modern set of features and ease of use than Make had.

Bali C
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John Munsch
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  • It seems to me that make possesses features a, b and c. Can you be more precise about what's wrong with make other than that it isn't 'modern'? (OK: I'm taking 'cross-platform' to mean 'all unixes' -- ahem -- but that aside...) – Norman Gray Jul 19 '12 at 17:19
  • @NormanGray Some of my complaints come down to its reliance on the underlying shell to perform actions and its syntax. Some of that could doubtless be dismissed as a matter of taste. But also the "all unixes" thing you mentioned is part of the problem as well. In this case I'm wanting something that includes "that other platform" as well. – John Munsch Jul 19 '12 at 18:57

3 Answers3

6

We have been happily using Rake for non-Ruby builds for a while now, having come to the conclusion that a decent build tool needs to have the capability of a programming language. We haven't found anything we can't do with it yet, and have applied it to both .NET and Java projects. Is that not language agnostic enough for you?

naught101
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David M
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4

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned scons.

It's written in Python, but it's cross-platform and language agnostic. I've started using it for personal C++ projects.

http://www.scons.org/

Also, the SCons website has a pretty good comparison with other products:

http://www.scons.org/wiki/SconsVsOtherBuildTools

And you can bundle SCons with your repository, which adds about 2Mb with all the tools:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/scons/files/scons-local/

anatoly techtonik
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m0j0
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2

Waf has similar design goals to Make, as far as I can see. I have not used either one extensively, but the waf wiki has a detailed comparison with other build systems which explains why make-like systems are not great. This largely comes down to the fact that make-like build systems implement their own limited programming language, which is not easily extensible, as opposed to using a fully featured existing programming language (Waf is python based).

naught101
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