So I have been coming across many comments/posts/etc regarding creating makefile

Question

So I have been coming across many comments/posts/etc regarding creating makefiles directly, and how it is a silly thing to do in 2015. I am aware of tools such as CMake, and I actually use CMake quite often. The thing is, CMake is just creating the Makefile for you and helping to remove the tedium of doing it yourself. Of course it adds a lot of other great features... but its still a Makefile in the end.

So my question is, is the 'obsolete' talk regarding make referring to the entire Make utility, or just the idea of manually writing your own Makefiles? I do not use an IDE for C/C++ development at all (just emacs), so I have always written Makefiles.

If Make is considered outdated, what should a C/C++ dev be using to build small, personal projects?

Explanation / Answer

The big difference is that CMake is a cross-platform meta-build system. A single CMake project can produce the usual Unix/Linux makefile, a Visual Studio project for Windows, an XCode project for Mac, and almost any other non-meta build system you might want to use or support.

I wouldn't say using make directly or even manually editing makefiles is "obsolete", but those are things you probably shouldn't do unless you are working on Unix/Linux stuff that won't need porting to Windows, much like how you should not be editing Visual Studio project files directly if you ever want to port them to not-Windows. If you have any interest in portability, it's worth learning a meta-build system like Scons or CMake.

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