Question

I want to know a good way to compile a program that uses many files and I want to avoid to recompile unmodified files.

It is for Linux, and I am looking for something that is different from Makefile.

Makefile has some problems:
It is long to write, and it is verbose to change as long I create new files; C/C++ use header files.
Makefile does not recompile a .c file if it includes a .h file that includes another .h file that was modified. It needs complex syntax.
Makefile uses the tabulation character, it is not good, because I use the tab key to indentation (it inserts 4 space chars instead).

As an example, my original compilation script is:

gcc file1.c -c -flags1
gcc file2.c -c -flags2
gcc file3.c file4.c -c -flags3
gcc file1.o file2.o file3.o file4.o -o a.out

And I want to avoid to recompile what is not needed with easy ways.

Answer 1

Some projects (Doom3, MongoDB and others) use SCons.

It’s written in Python and has many features (like parallel compilation).