I hate MSVC

Are you arguing that it's good design to have invisible characters behave differently or am I missing your point?

They might be working on an old codebase with maintainers who yell at you if you try to standardize formatting because "whitespace changes pollute diffs" (smh, programmers who don't know how to configure their diff tools).

If you want a really advanced build system there's shake, which can deal with things like building things that generates dependency information for things that build things. In a nutshell: It's strictly more powerful than make because (a single invocation of) make operates on a fixed dependency graph while shake can discover dependencies as it goes.

Mostly though you should use whatever comes with the language you're using, and if you're doing something simple use make. That includes "link a multi-language project where the components are generated by language-specific systems". It notably doesn't include multi-stage compiler builds. GHC switched from recursive make, which is a bad idea, to non-recursive make, which was... arcane, but at least you didn't have to make clean to get a correct build, to shake. Here's the build system it's a whole project to itself.

So it's like make but without incremental builds? Then how is it functionally different from a folder with a bunch of shell scripts in it?

Everything has it's uses. make is maybe good at incremental builds but is (an)used as a task runner which requires the use of "PHONY" in many places, it has about 6 different ways to declare and use variables all with different gotchas, generally has a convoluted syntax, it doesn't support different interpreters per task, and lacks a bunch more features. Just explore the feature list and examples that just has.

It's simply outdated and mostly lives by the power of defaults and graybeards insisting on its use. Therecs no surprise that things like cmake, nmake, and other tools sprung up to replace it.

Anti Commercial-AI license