Time for Makefiles to Make a Comeback
If you compare Makefiles to the JavaScript ecosystem it will do so favorably, but many things will.<p>Make is a good build system but it is a shitty deployment system. Yes, you can do everything you want if you put enough effort in it as it is a complete scripting system, something many alternatives are not.<p>It does not mean that it is a good idea to do so.<p>Recently a client made me begrudgingly try Maven. &#x27;Yet another make system&#x27; I thought. Yup, pretty standard one: &#x27;mvn install&#x27; ,I&#x27;ll compile everything and will also do something make has never done for me: install dependencies.<p>Sure, it is doable to do this with a makefile. With a lot of efforts multiplied by the number of platforms you target. In Maven you just add repos and dependencies to your pom file.<p>So yes, there recent build systems that are worse than Make but it does not mean that make is the perfect system with all the features we need.<p>It is minimalistic. It works. But it should not be your only option.