Best Build System
 

What's your favorite build system? Which ones need to be added to this poll?

Oh.. no way to edit polls I created?

For my own stuff, I just use a plain old makefile. Autotools has always seemed like a prime example of "cure is worse than the disease" to me. I don't know much about the other 3 on you list.

mk from Plan9
make
makefiles
tinycc

I hate cmake as it sucks and frankly avoid any cpp things like the plague (for many reasons), but especially because building cpp from source is often harder than it's worth.

I'm not sure what the best is, but I like sofort.

https://git.midipix.org/sofort

This is a compiler, not a build system.

clearmake is the best I know.
CMake is not a build system, but a build system generator and the generated build system is not "the best" at all.

"Favorite" would have been a better title for this poll and thread. So let's try that theme from here on. :)

Still.. good info so far.

I've mostly been using GNU autotools the last few years for small projects. I never spent the time to learn how to write just plain Makefiles, but have gotten pretty handy with automake and autoconf in the last year-and-a-half.

I tried changing a few projects to CMake but never was too happy that CMake doesn't create an "uninstall" rule.

I don't completely understand the logic behind the statement: "We do not want 'make uninstall' to remove useful files from the system." If 'make uninstall' removed files from someone's system, wouldn't that mean 'make install' overwrote files on the system? I mean, if the idea is that uninstalling files only uninstalls files that were installed with 'make install'? If there were any files overwritten, wouldn't that be a matter of a user setting an install target that was unintended?

Recently someone suggested to me that Meson was "better" than CMake or Autootools; I've since tried it out on two of my small projects, created a binary and a library. Meson is... interesting. Without stumbling into any major bugs, I basically got it to do everything I needed to do for those small projects, with the help of folks from #mesonbuild on IRC. The docs are pretty good, mostly complete, imo, but I find them a little bit difficult to navigate at times. But what I couldn't find in the docs, I got answers to with good speed from #mesonbuild. As for minor bugs, sometimes it's difficult to call anything a "bug" until I'm sure it's not user-error from lack of experience. xD. But with over 900 issues open on the project repo, I'm concerned about porting yet until I know what I may be facing.

I'm not in any real hurry though to switch my build systems (or generator systems xD). GNU autotools has worked pretty well for me, I may never switch. Once in a while I get pretty frustrated with it but somehow I can always get things to work in the end.

Gradle
 

Gradle is quite versatile and takes some time to get even the basics, yet somehow (within a reasonable amount of time spent on websearches) I manage to configure the project the way I want. I have seen it mostly used for Java projects but I have also successfully build a small c program with it.

Need more options....
 

....those are old or boring or insane.

cmake worries me. It seems like a grand leap in the wrong direction.

Things like https://github.com/apenwarr/redo are more interesting.

there is a tool named tup too and there are additional "extensions" like ccache and audited objects (not to speak about maven).

All are worse
 

Hugely overcomplicated pseudo-"universal" stuff, fraught with weird errors and eldritch misbehaviours. Why learn a whole extra made-up language (no matter if it styles itself a "build system" when it IS Turing-complete) when you already have two (sh AND make) you need to know irregardless? Just make full use of either. It is not THAT hard.

Myself, I use a "build system" written by my very own self. 20 kb of portable shell code; 8 years in use; no problems at all. And less time spent WRITING it, than would have gone into LEARNING autotools OR cmake OR whatever-is-in-fashion-today.

Agreed. CMake is even worse, it's a bad language that autogenerates a worse language.

Personally I opt for ruby as much nicer than shell, but I agree with you.


Although I do think the redo /tup generation of tools are on to some good ideas.