What does HackerNews think of fabricate?
The better build tool. Finds dependencies automatically for any language.
Language:
Python
My biggest disappointment with make, and almost all it’s clones, is that I have to manually write out pre-reqs and targets.
My computer knows what files I read and write. Use that to calculate what you should do.
Some systems head in this direction — there is “tup”, and a Python program I love called fabricate ( https://github.com/brushtechnology/fabricate ), that records what a program reads, then doesn’t rerun it if no input has changed.
fabricate.py (https://github.com/brushtechnology/fabricate), based off the now ancient memoize.py.
In my experience with C/++, it is faster to combine Make & ccache: just have every C file depend on every header file, and let ccache decide if it needs to be rebuilt.
There have been systems that take this approach such as fabricate.py (https://github.com/brushtechnology/fabricate) and tup (http://gittup.org/tup/).