Simple make system - putting it all together

So putting all the build principles together I built a makefile system which is very simple to use. Read the C++ Compiler Concepts and Make - Concepts to understand it.

You can see it in action in a tutorial video I use for my team.

To build an executable called test it involves:

1. Place the c and cpp files for the application in a directory.

2. Add a makefile. The makefile should list the directories with other library code you want to compile and link. Here is an example:

It links all the files together into a single statically linked binary which is either test or test.exe under windows.

It’s fast and simple.

• It works natively on windows and it’s fast since it doesn’t invoke submake processes.

  • It doesn’t require any other tools other than GNU make and the Microsoft compiler for that platform.

• It implements support for dependency files under Mac and Linux so if you change a header and do a build you’ll get a minimal rebuild.

• It makes use of ccache under Mac and Linux so that if you do a second compile it’s much faster

• Because it uses wildcard matching to build up the list of target files there is no need to manually maintain lists of source or object files.

• It doesn’t bother with creating intermediate library files since when I ship applications I generally think it is easier to support statically linked binaries.

You can get an up to date copy of makefile.core from my public repository:

https://github.com/eliotmuirgrid/core/blob/main/make/makefile.core

To try out the makefile system you can follow the instructions for the C++ tracing sandbox.

One problem we ran into with windows with this system was the length of the command line got exceeded. @Vismay Shah needs to update the concepts site to show the solution to this problem.