Recommendations for a Windows based make tool

Question

Does anyone have any recommendations for a good, fast, make tool? SCons? KJam? Something else?

Cross platform tools would also be acceptable.

Answer 1

On a PC is said in your title, so I assume you mean Windows? If so, I would recommend installing the Cygwin environment and if you install all the packages along with it, GNU's make is part of the deal. If you are on a Linux platform or one of the Unix variants, then you can just go with the GNU make directly.

Answer 2

You may be interested in cross-platform tools like Ant, Rake, Gant. These should give you most, if not all the functionality of GNU make, though compiling C code may be harder in some than other.

Answer 3

I've recently started using BJam. It is cross-platform and has a saner syntax than make.

Answer 4

• GNU make is fast, but the native Windows-port is not very polished; there are a lot of pitfal regarding things like which shell is used to execute your commands. (Search for "MS-DOS" in the GNU make manual.)
• SCons works very well on Windows. SCons had (last time I looked) some serious performance issues on large projects (thousands of files and upwards), but that was a couple of years ago.
• CMake is an excellent tool if you want to work in Visual Studio but still stay crossplatform and allow other development tools on other platform. Can also generate makefiles for windows, so you're not bound to Visual Studio.
• Whatever you may think of Ant, it is not a replacement for Make. That's like saying that a SUV is a replacement for a Formula 1 car. They are entirely different beasts. Ant is good for some things, and make for others.
• There is a relatively new tool called premake which you may want to investigate. It looked promisiing when I looked, but I haven't checked it out in any detail.

Answer 5

If you're on Windows and you have the .Net Framework, you can use MSBuild. It's very similar to nAnt, and also has a lot of support from the community (some very detailed community toolkits are out there). It has a somewhat steep learning curve, but it's quite powerful once you get the hang of it.

Also another option could be writing PowerShell scripts. It depends what you want to do I guess. In my limited experience with makefiles, they've usually be to compile something, or set environment conditions, which you would use batch files for on a Windows platform.

Answer 6

If you need to build C-language based projects, take a look at rtEasyMake at www.routinetools.com. It is windows based and very easy to setup.