Item — HN Reader

I maybe a contrarian, but i really hate custom made build tools. They contain a lot of "black magic"(no documentation nor community help) and are difficult to debug and extend. I think it is much better to stay with standard build tools. Time spent in learning them is well worth it.

In your case i might have gone with SCons+distcc+ccache rather than a custom made one.

1 comments

I hate having to use custom build tools made by others, and I agree with you if we're talking about code that is going to be distributed.

But for personal projects that aren't intended for use by the rest of the world, I don't see any problem with them. Back when I played with custom build tools, I split the difference and made sure to implement a means to export a makefile equivalent. (Since then, I've moved back to just using the standard tools).