I just wish someone would RIIR Gnu make.

I use it heavily and think it's extremely underappreciated, so instead of reinventing it, I would like to build on it. But - trying to extend the old C codebase is daunting. I'd even be happy with a reduced featureset that avoids the exotic stuff that is either outdated or no longer useful. The core syntax of a Makefile is just so close to perfect.

(I wrote about some of this in the remake repo: https://github.com/rocky/remake/issues/114 )

dataflow

You had me until

> The core syntax of a Makefile is just so close to perfect.

I'd argue what is close to perfect is much of the underlying model/semantics, and what is terrible is very much the syntax. I've long wanted to make something similar to Make but simply with better syntax...

skore

To me, the core of the syntax is:

    target: prereq | ooprereq
        recipe

In my eyes, the most important thing when building something that is complex is the dependency graph and it makes sense to make the syntax for defining the graph as simple as possible. I think the make syntax just nails it and most of the other approaches I have seen so far add complexity without any benefit. In fact, most of the complexity they introduce seems to stem from confusion on the side of the developer being unable to simplify what they're trying to express.

At the level of variable handling and so forth, make is slightly annoying but manageable.

Anything beyond that - yeah, I'm with you, a lot of that is terrible.

megous