Goodbye Make and Shell, Hello... Python?

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2024-12-02 19:00:04

Ok I’ll admit it, the title is a bit dramatic. Makefiles and shell scripts are here to stay, and that’s fine. I’m wouldn’t make the argument that any tool is the perfect tool for all tasks all the time. With that disclaimer out of the way…

When it comes to build tooling, most of us live in a world that is a Frankenstein conglomeration of Bash scripts and Make rules. That’s great, until:

I’m not saying you should never use Make and shell scripts for build tooling. Sometimes your build tooling really has simple, concise, and direct requirements that never expand. But projects have this funny way of quietly growing until you find yourself dreading the thought of making the simplest changes to your build code. The cognitive overload of working on it can be a constant drain on the developer. I know this, because I’ve lived it more times than I’d care to remember. So I wanted to experiment with something new…

Early last year I started a personal software project and something I wanted to try was using Python (instead of bash+Make) for my build and project tooling. And wow has it exceeded my expectations. It’s everything I thought it’d be and more. Here are some approaches (some related, others completely unrelated) that I took that really worked for me…

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