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The venerable UNG Make: An ancient build tool that works great and is still better than most alternatives
January 10, 2020

The venerable UNG Make: An ancient build tool that works great and is still better than most alternatives

Jonathan Yu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with GNU Make

Our team uses GNU Make to build any of our software projects once they have reached a reasonable level of complexity. We use it to build Go, C, and Fortran-based projects to provide simple "make build" or "make test" steps to compile code and run tests. It's an old-fashioned tool, and I wish there were better tools available, but none of the contenders seem to have the simplicity and extensibility that Make does. Other devices seem to be language-specific and specialized for specific ecosystems (e.g., maven or Gradle are great for Java, but not for C projects). Batch files are simpler but don't perform as well and don't provide as much out-of-the-box flexibility (e.g., ability to compile only specific files rather than a full build).
  • Dependency tracking (only re-build files if needed)
  • Simple to integrate with existing command-line tools
  • No dependency management tools (but there are no cross-platform tools of this type anyway)
  • Tedious to do cross-compilation (Debug & Release builds, 32- and 64-bit builds, x86/ARM builds)
  • Easier to onboard new developers
  • Straightforward integration with CI/CD systems
I'm a full-stack developer that has used various build tools, including Maven, Gradle, and NPM/yarn. For our C projects, I also investigated CMake and Ninja, but they seemed more difficult to learn and more tedious to work with. GNU Make is a single binary that can be easily downloaded, even for Windows under MingW32, is straightforward to learn, and works pretty well despite its age.
I don't think anyone is actively developing GNU Make anymore, but it is available everywhere and does not seem to have any significant bugs or unresolved defects. Linux packages are available, and it is a cross-platform tool, even working pretty well on Windows under MingW32. A lot of people have used Make and know how it works, so it should be easy to hire people to modify or extend your Makefiles, even if nobody remembers how it works.

Do you think GNU Make delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with GNU Make's feature set?

Yes

Did GNU Make live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of GNU Make go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy GNU Make again?

Yes

GNU Make is a great tool for simple builds where language-specific options are not available, or to provide shortcuts for common commands (e.g., "make build" as shorthand for "go build ..." with a bunch of flags). However, it is complementary to other build systems. It does not replace them, which is perhaps one of its greatest strengths as well (works with existing ecosystem instead of trying to do everything). GMU Make it simple to get started with, and the philosophy of understanding how sources map to outputs, as well as the dependency graph, are beneficial.