SHshepherdjerred·Apr 28, 2024
Make is excellent if you use it properly to model your dependencies. This works really well for languages like C/C++, but I think Make really struggles with languages like Go, JavaScript, and Python or when your using a large combination of technologies.
I've found Earthly [0] to be the _perfect_ tool to replace Make. It's a familiar syntax (combination of Dockerfiles + Makefiles). Every target is run in an isolated Docker container, and each target can copy files from other targets. This allows Earthly to perform caching and parallelization for free, and in addition you get lots of safety with containerization. I've been using Earthly for a couple of years now and I love it.
Some things I've built with it:
* At work [1], we use it to build Docker images for E2E testing. This includes building a Go project, our mkdocs documentation, our V
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ue UI, and a ton of little scripts all over the place for generating documentation, release notes, dependency information (like the licenses of our deps), etc.
* I used it to create my macOS cross compiler project [2].
* A project for playing a collaborative game of Pokemon on Discord [3]
IMO Makefiles are great if you have a few small targets. If you're looking at more than >50 lines, if your project uses many languages, or you need to run targets in a Docker container, then Earthly is a great choice.
[0]: https://earthly.dev/
[1]: https://p3m.dev/
[2]: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/macos-cross-compiler
[3]: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/discord-plays-pokemon