makefiles intro

2005-12-31

Ynon PerekIntroduction To Make

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Lecture OutlineLecture Outline

Software Development Cycle Introducing MakeMake's DisadvantagesA Simple “Hello Make”

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Software Development Cycle

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Unfortunately, Routine is Boring

Transforming code into object files is a routine process

Developers need to perform it “Following the manual”

Error Prone and time consuming

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Luckily, There Is A Better Way

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Introducing Make

The make utility was written by Stuart Feldman from Bell Labs in 1977

make automatically builds executable programs and libraries from source code

make is widely used especially in UNIX based platforms

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Introducing Make

The make utility automatically determines which pieces of a larger program need to be recompiled

This saves developer's time and effort.

A lot less error prone

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Introducing Make

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Introducing Make

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Introducing Make

Original 'make' utility has evolved into three main branches:

BSD makeGNU makeMicrosoft nmake

Each branch added their own set of unique features

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Make The Bad Parts

Decides whether to build dependencies based on a file's timestamp

Non intuitive syntax regarding spaces and tabs

Platform dependent

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A Sample make hello

hello: hello.c

gcc hello.c -o hello