Programming/Tools/Make

Make

Make is a build automation tool that automatically builds executable programs and libraries from source code by reading files called Makefiles which specify how to derive the target program. Though integrated development environments and language-specific compiler features can also be used to manage a build process, Make remains widely used, especially on Unix and Unix-like (e.g. Linux) operating systems.

Besides building programs, Make can be used to manage any project where some files must be updated automatically from others whenever the others change.

Make was originally created by Stuart Feldman in April 1976 at Bell Labs. Feldman received the 2003 ACM Software System Award for the authoring of this tool.

Feldman was inspired to write Make by the experience of a coworker in futilely debugging a program of his where the executable was accidentally not being updated with changes:

Make originated with a visit from Steve Johnson (author of yacc, etc.), storming into my office, cursing the Fates that had caused him to waste a morning debugging a correct program (bug had been fixed, file hadn't been compiled, cc *.o was therefore unaffected). As I had spent a part of the previous evening coping with the same disaster on a project I was working on, the idea of a tool to solve it came up. It began with an elaborate idea of a dependency analyzer, boiled down to something much simpler, and turned into Make that weekend. Use of tools that were still wet was part of the culture. Makefiles were text files, not magically encoded binaries, because that was the Unix ethos: printable, debuggable, understandable stuff.

—Stuart Feldman, The Art of Unix Programming, Eric S. Raymond, 2003.