from Hacker News

Finally a decent alternative to make?

by pswenson on 8/25/17, 5:30 PM with 10 comments

• by grzm on 8/26/17, 7:36 AM

  Please don't editorialize submission titles. It's against the HN guidelines. This is a link to the go-task/task repo, which describes itself as a "Simple task runner / Make alternative written in Go".

  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

• by divyekapoor on 8/25/17, 11:35 PM

  I hate to break it to the author - despite the effort put in, task is solving the wrong problem. The biggest problem in build systems is not the syntax, it's dependency management and reproducibility.

  Buck / Bazel and to a very minimal extent make, get this right. There are pattern match rules and extensibility rules. The dependency graph largely works.

  Task is trying to be a decent make alternative, but it's solving a years old problem. The next problem in build systems needs more thought and execution.

  Best wishes, Divye

• by rodrigosetti on 8/26/17, 4:50 PM

  Yes, it's a decent syntax sugar alternative for the kids. But it's not going to win if it doesn't solve the real problem: reproductive builds. A problem that CMake (and similars) are really trying to solve.

• by Majora320 on 8/26/17, 11:44 PM

  What about tup? http://gittup.org/tup/

• by aphextron on 8/26/17, 7:32 AM

  There's a million decent alternatives to Make. None of them are installed as standard software on every Unix-like system.