mrbuild VS plan9port

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

Acme is genuinely worth trying, you can run it on Linux/Mac without a VM [1]. I'm pretty sure Russ Cox [2] and Rob Pike use it as their daily driver which is insane because it doesn't even have syntax highlighting. I used it for years when I was in school as an exercise in masochism, but I learned a lot about Unix, and the mouse-driven workflow actually grew on me.

[1]: https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/

[2] https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/

If you find it too complicated and closely tied to Go internals, you can also check out Plan 9 from User Space's version, which is itself based on libthread from Plan 9 starting from 3rd edition, which is itself based on Alef's implementation of channels (Alef is Go's grandfather).

I tried plan9port's mk for a moment out of curiosity. I quickly ran into an annoying usability problem: it compares file mtimes with second accuracy.

https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/blob/cc4571fec67407652b03...

With sub-second build times for individual targets, this causes mk to needlessly recompile files because the target may have the same mtime as the prerequisites.