mrbuild VS just

2. Write a tiny build system with Make or use any of the precanned ones. I use this: https://github.com/dkogan/mrbuild/ but there are many others

In any case, learning how to actually use Make is a prerequisite to having an opinion here.

I think Make is exactly what you want, and I do recommend it to everybody, since the default alternative is usually something heinous like CMake which isn't really an improvement. You want the bit of logic to create a "build system" out of Make abstracted into a library, and then it's perfect. I use this: https://github.com/dkogan/mrbuild/ but there're many other ways to do it

Make is a language for making build systems. CMake is a build system that uses Make written by people who haven't read the manual. Anybody touching build systems at all needs to do themselves a huge favor: read the GNU Make manual to be able to write a Makefile to support a small project. This isn't difficult, and gives you wonderful perspective about what build systems are great and which aren't. CMake is good if you need to support many different unixes and xcode and visual studio. If you don't, then cmake gives you lots of pain for no benefit.

Make is simple and good-enough for most cases. I use this: https://github.com/dkogan/mrbuild

But it's not special and there are lots like it. And they are all infinitely better than cmake

I don't like makefiles, but I've been enjoying justfiles: https://github.com/casey/just

I started using just [0] on my projects and have been very happy so far. It is very similar to make but focused on commands rather than build outputs.

Define your recipes and then you can compose them as needed.

[0] https://github.com/casey/just

just - https://github.com/casey/just

Welp there is absolute chaos in that thread -- guess it's not an April Fools joke.

I wonder if relying on CI for anything other than provisioning machines is a mistake -- maybe we should have never moved from doing things from local scripts written in $LANGUAGE.

That said, I'm probably biased since I'm a massive fan of things like `make` and more appropriately for the current age, `just`[0]

[0]: https://github.com/casey/just

> When a command has some cognitive requirements I create a script with some ${1:-default} values and I store them all in $PATH enabled local/bin

I would consider using just for this:

https://github.com/casey/just

Your coworker's experience is more principled: Make is a mediocre tool for executing commands. It wasn't ever designed for that. Although it is pretty common to see what you are mentioning in projects because it doesn't require installing a dependency.

For a repo where an easy to install (single binary) dependency is a non-issue, consider using just. [1] You get `just -l` where you can see all the command available, the ability to use different languages, and overall simpler command writing.

[1] https://github.com/casey/just

This is fantastic, but I'd say that this solution is somewhat in response to this open issue from 2019:

https://github.com/casey/just/issues/429

I really wish just was included as a package in distributions.

So far, I didn't work on new features at all but on stabilizing the ground for further development: 1. CMake lists and modules were rewritten a lot, now managing builds and their configurations is much lesser pain. 2. Brought in Justfile for regular tasks, and it's great, no less. 3. Linters, formatters, analyzers for almost all the code (except for Janet for now, as because of it being a niche and young technology, it didn't get enough attention yet). 4. ECS stub. Now runtime class doesn't look like a god object. 5. Started writing unit tests which didn't happen with my personal projects before and maybe indicates how serious am I about this one :D 6. Some of previously hardcoded data has been moved to INI files. Now, if I release the game in 10 years, and in 10 more years some eccentric person decides to make a variant of it, it will be slightly simpler.

i've grown to like this for my personal projects. https://github.com/casey/just