[erlang-questions] Use of makefiles

[Toby Thain]

On 6-Mar-08, at 4:37 AM, Bengt Kleberg wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> You are correct. If we want to build C programs the different C
> compilers are more of a problem than perl or make incompatibilities.

Only in highly unusual projects.

Make can help abstract this in several ways, firstly the name of the  
system compiler ($(CC), $(CXX)).

OT by now though.
--Toby


> You
> suggestion that erlang could help with C compilation is a very good  
> one.
>
> Thanks for explaining perl to me. It sounds as bad as make.
>
> Building erlang programs is, IMHO, best done with erl -make. Users are
> more interested in having later versions of the program they are  
> really
> working with. Make/Perl is only secondary in this scenario.
>
>
> bengt
>
> On Thu, 2008-03-06 at 11:51 +1300, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
>> On 5 Mar 2008, at 8:58 pm, Bengt Kleberg wrote:
>>> The question I asked was if a perl program would be more likely  
>>> to run
>>> on ''any'' machine, than a makefile. Not because the person who  
>>> wrote
>>> the makefile forgot/failed to read the manual for gnu make, but
>>> because
>>> there are other make programs than gnu make out there. The 4 ones I
>>> have
>>> used where not compatible. They would not run each others makefiles.
>>
>> If you stick to what's described in the original Make paper, every
>> Make I
>> have ever come across (save on Windows) is compatible with that.   
>> I try
>> to stick to what's described in the Single Unix Specification, and
>> haven't
>> had any trouble with portability.  I haven't tried nmake on  
>> Windows, but
>> GNU make is available for Windows and can handle POSIX (=SUS)  
>> makefiles.
>>>
>>>
>>> I have heard that there is only one perl, so it should be  
>>> compatible.
>>
>> It is not true that there is only one Perl.  There has been one Perl
>> development
>> stream, but there have been many versions issued in that stream.   
>> What
>> works
>> in Perl 5.8.8 might not work in Perl 5.4, and probably won't work in
>> Perl 6 if that
>> ever gets finished.  (You are aware that Perl 6 is supposed to be a
>> whole new
>> language?)
>>>
>>> So, is the chance of finding perl on ''any'' computer bigger than  
>>> the
>>> chance of finding the right make program for your makefile?
>>
>> I respectfully suggest that there is a bigger problem than makefile
>> compatibility,
>> and that is C compiler command line compatibility.  For example, to
>> get optimised
>> code I write
>> 	cc -O2 foobar.c
>> on one machine, but
>> 	cc -xO2 foobar.c
>> on another, and on another machine, sadly decommissioned because the
>> vendor
>> having stopped making the hardware and having decided never to  
>> upgrade
>> the
>> compiler or operating system nevertheless decided to start charging a
>> really
>> ridiculous licence fee to run the thing in multiuser mode, the  
>> command
>> line switches
>> were different again.  Come to think of it, I have three C compilers
>> on one machine,
>> all with different switches, so simply checking which operating  
>> system
>> it is won't help.
>>
>> When I use R, all of that is handled for me; if I ask the R system to
>> arrange a C (or
>> Fortran) compilation for me, it remembers what worked when it was
>> built, and does
>> it for me.  Wouldn't it be nice if installing Erlang gave you
>> 	erl cc ...
>> that would run a C compiler with all the right switches to work with
>> Erlang?
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> bengt
>>>
>>> .On Tue, 2008-03-04 at 13:09 -0500, Toby Thain wrote:
>>>> On 4-Mar-08, at 11:57 AM, Bengt Kleberg wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Greetings,
>>>>>
>>>>> Is it not also the case that perl is more standard than make?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Is *everyone* supposed to rewrite make in Perl every time they want
>>>> to build something?
>>>>
>>>>> I know very little of perl, but have fought at least 4 different
>>>>> kinds
>>>>> of make (files).
>>>>
>>>> The GNU make documentation is really very good. I don't know why
>>>> people rarely refer to it.
>>>>
>>>> --T
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> bengt
>>>>>
>>>>> On Tue, 2008-03-04 at 10:11 -0600, James Hague wrote:
>>>>>> On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 8:41 PM, Steve Vinoski <vinoski@REDACTED>
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Hi Joe, I agree with you 100%. Give me emacs (with its vast
>>>>>>> emacs-lisp
>>>>>>> extensibility), bash (or ksh), and various UNIX command-line
>>>>>>> tools,
>>>>>>> which I can combine as I wish using pipes, and keep the visual
>>>>>>> tools
>>>>>>> out of my way (and out of my RAM).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I think this discussion has been misinterpreted :)  No one is
>>>>>> arguing
>>>>>> for IDE-like features over makefiles.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I have found that I don't need makefiles for my Erlang  
>>>>>> projects.  I
>>>>>> either recompile the same module repeatedly or I want to rebuild
>>>>>> everything.  The former is business as usual.  The latter is  
>>>>>> easily
>>>>>> done with a shell script, Perl script, or short Erlang  
>>>>>> program.  I
>>>>>> use
>>>>>> makefiles infrequently enough that I always forget the syntax and
>>>>>> nuances of using them.  But I can bang out a Perl program that  
>>>>>> does
>>>>>> the same thing--even checking file modification dates and so  
>>>>>> on--in
>>>>>> very little time.  It's more flexible than using a makefile, too,
>>>>>> and
>>>>>> usually ends up being less "code."
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>>
>> --
>> Te Reo Engarihi is a taonga of Te Iwi Pakeha,
>> ergo we should keep it pure, sans mélange, ruat caelum.
>>
>>
>>
>
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