The Ultimate Frontend Build tool: make
God I hate make. I hate make so very, very much. Compiling code isn't that hard. I swear to the programming lords on high it isn't.<p>Here's a wonderfully useful open source project - Google gperftools [1]. It includes TCMalloc amongst other things. The Makefile.in is 6390 lines long. Configure is 20,767 lines long. Libtool is 10247 lines long. That's fucking insane.<p>Compiling OpenSource is such a pain in the ass. Particularly if you trying to use it in a cross-platform Windows + OS X + Linux environment. One of my favorite things about iOS middleware is that one of their #1 goals is to make it as easy as possible to integrate into your project. Usually as simple as add a lib, include a header, and call one single line of code to initialize their system (in the case of crash report generation and gathering).<p>I work on a professional project. We have our own content and code build pipeline. It supports many platforms. I don't want anyone's god damn make bullshit. I want to drop some source code and library dependencies into my source tree that already exists and click my build button that already exists.<p></rant><p>[1] <a href="https://code.google.com/p/gperftools/" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/gperftools/</a>