HACKER Q&A
📣 Datenstrom

Any Good Make Alternatives?


I'm starting a new greenfield personal project which is a great time to try something new. Are there any new Make alternatives that I should try for building a multi-language, monorepo project that also has a number of Linux system dependencies?

For some context the languages will definitely be Python and Julia, with possibly Rust, C/C++, and CUDA. I'll likely be using poetry or conda for managing Python and there are also a good number of system dependencies that will need to be installed on a Linux box.

  👤 bediger4000 Accepted Answer ✓
Why have all the previous Make alternatives failed to get traction?

I mean, ant, gradle, maven, imake, there's probably others... all have had their moment as the "It Girl" of builds, and then seemed to wither away. What's up with that?

👤 ChrisRackauckas
For Julia the reproducibility is rather straightforward. You just stick a Project.toml/Manifest.toml in there and you'll always get the same package versions. Keeping the non-Julia dependencies together will be the hard part though.
👤 leephillips
Why do you seek an alternative to Make? It does the job, brilliantly. I’m not a fan of the syntax, however, especially the need for tabs. Is that your main concern?
👤 bradwood
https://github.com/casey/just
👤 pid-1
I've been using VSCode + .devcontainer with great success.

I've also tried Nix recently, but couldn't grok it.

👤 muxneo
I guess ninja could be a good alternative
👤 yuppie_scum
Dockerfile