> Make does support multiple outputs, though the syntax sucks.
No, it doesn’t. There’s NO syntax for multiple outputs. If you can show me what the syntax is and prove me wrong, I’d love to see it. At best, there are workarounds for the lack of multiple output support, with various tradeoffs.
> Make is a programming language with a built-in dependency mechanism, and as such you can use it to build whatever you want...
Make is NOT a programming language. End of story. You can… kind of… build things with it, given that variables in Make can be used like functions, but it’s goddamn horrible and you shouldn’t do it because nobody will want to use it and nobody will maintain it.
At most, you can build something on top of Make, but you’re still facing the limitations of Make and working around them. If you are interested in building something on top of a low-level build system, you want Ninja instead of Make, because Ninja is good at that. Make isn’t.
Make is, at best, something you would want to use for a small C program where all the files are in one directory. Once you grow past that use case, my rule is that you shouldn't be using Make any more, because there are just too many things that Make does wrong.
Make is successful because eh, it’s good enough for small things, you can suffer through the pain if you need to use it for big things, and it was the first tool to solve this problem. We have better tools now. We had better have better tools now! Make is in its fifth decade… if we didn’t improve on Make in that many years, that would be a damning indictment of the entire field.
GNU Make does support multiple outputs, but the feature is very new (it's in the latest release that came out earlier this year), so if you didn't happen to catch that release announcement you probably missed it. The support is called 'grouped targets', documented in the second half of this page: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Multiple-... -- the syntax has &: in the rule line.
(One point you don't mention in your list of reasons why Make is successful is that it's reliably available everywhere. For projects that ship as source for others to build, that matters, and it delays uptake of fancy new build systems in that segment.)
The big advantage of make to me is I understand it and can figure out what happens when things go wrong. When something doesn't work the way I want with cmake or autotools (I haven't used Bazel etc.), I have to randomly start googling things. Sometimes I literally resort to editing the generated cmake Makefiles because I have no idea how to tell cmake what I want it to do...
No, it doesn’t. There’s NO syntax for multiple outputs. If you can show me what the syntax is and prove me wrong, I’d love to see it. At best, there are workarounds for the lack of multiple output support, with various tradeoffs.
> Make is a programming language with a built-in dependency mechanism, and as such you can use it to build whatever you want...
Make is NOT a programming language. End of story. You can… kind of… build things with it, given that variables in Make can be used like functions, but it’s goddamn horrible and you shouldn’t do it because nobody will want to use it and nobody will maintain it.
At most, you can build something on top of Make, but you’re still facing the limitations of Make and working around them. If you are interested in building something on top of a low-level build system, you want Ninja instead of Make, because Ninja is good at that. Make isn’t.
Make is, at best, something you would want to use for a small C program where all the files are in one directory. Once you grow past that use case, my rule is that you shouldn't be using Make any more, because there are just too many things that Make does wrong.
Make is successful because eh, it’s good enough for small things, you can suffer through the pain if you need to use it for big things, and it was the first tool to solve this problem. We have better tools now. We had better have better tools now! Make is in its fifth decade… if we didn’t improve on Make in that many years, that would be a damning indictment of the entire field.