Life is and will always be better writing your own Makefiles. It's literally so easy. I do not get the distaste. Cmake is arcane magic. Bazel is practically written in runes. Makefile is a just a glorified build script, but where you don't have to use a bunch of if statements to avoid building everything each time.

[–] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 15 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

really anyone worth their salt should write perl code to generate makefiles depending on the phase of the moon and if you sacrificed a $chicken, a @chicken, or a %chicken at runtime.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It's one of those massively elegant concepts of the past that's become unfashionable to learn pretty much just do to time and ubiquity.

[–] leggettc18@programming.dev 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

That works until you need to support Visual Studio or Xcode. Then you either maintain their stuff manually too, or you get CMake to generate all three. I don’t love it but it solves the problem it’s meant to solve. The issue is people using it when they don’t need to.

[–] Hack3900@lemy.lol 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm not familiar with either why can't you use Make with VS or Xcode? Can you not set them up to have whatever build bind call Make ?

[–] leggettc18@programming.dev 1 points 3 months ago

Tbh I’m not sure if you can. That’s proprietary IDEs for you.

[–] zaphod@sopuli.xyz 3 points 3 months ago

Xcode implies MacOS, you can use make there too, just beware that some commandline tools take different arguments on BSDs.

[–] KindaABigDyl@programming.dev 1 points 3 months ago

You can build with mingw64 built with msvc and use more or less the same Makefile. As for Xcode... well, there's not really a good reason to support Mac. On principle I wouldn't even try

[–] Socsa@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Manual makefiles don't scale though and you end up needing some other bootstrap framework pretty quick.

[–] KindaABigDyl@programming.dev 1 points 3 months ago

How the heck does a Makefile not scale??? That's all it does!

[–] WormFood@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

this is fine until you need autotools which is worse than cmake