Question

I’m lately feeling the need to learn a build tool. I’m looking through StackOverflow for recommendations and Gnu Make gets barely mentioned. Instead I see Ant, Maven, CMake, Scon and many others. However, when I look at the little “rogue sources” (as in not-in-the-repo) that I sometimes have to compile, they all require the make && make install steps.

Is learning Make a worse investment of my time than learning another tool?

If so why is Make still so popular?

Answer 1

Make is the standard build tool for everything C/C++. Many others have stepped to the plate, but even when they were useful and successful, they never achieved the ubiquity of make.

Make is installed on virtually every Unix-like machine out there. No matter if you’re working with AIX, Solaris, Irix, BSD, or Linux, if there’s a compiler installed, there’s also make.

Some of the “replacements” (like Automake, CMake) even create Makefiles, which are in turn executed by make.

I would definitely recommend becoming familiar with make. If handled by someone who took the time to learn about make, it is a powerful tool, which can be used in a number of ways not even necessarily related to software development.

Even if you end up using a different build tool in the end, you will be able to “recycle” the lessons learned with make, as the underlying concepts are quite similar. And the sheer number of make-built projects means that there will always be the chance that you have to figure out an existing Makefile.

One thing, though. Get it right from the beginning.