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Show HN: Makex: A Modern Build/Automation Tool

4 pointsby nateskulic4 months ago
Hi Everyone!<p>I want to show Makex, a modern build&#x2F;automation tool.<p>It has been under development for approximately 1 year, receiving many improvements over this time.<p>Makex was designed to replace the original Make, and to supplant Bazel and other related build systems.<p>It&#x27;s built for handling large monorepos, while keeping it open for a hybrid&#x2F;mono&#x2F;multi-repo future. It&#x27;s also designed for safety, reproducibility, clarity, speed, incrementality, simplicity and more — the things you&#x27;d expect out of a modern build system.<p>We&#x27;ve written many Makex files internally, and it&#x27;s replaced dozens of existing Makefiles among other build&#x2F;automation scripts. It does everything it says it does. It is fairly mature at this point (but there is more work ahead).<p>There&#x27;s a lot more in the feature pipeline. For example, we&#x27;re adding task resource thresholding (or constraints) in the next release. As far as I know, no other build tool has an effective way to keep large highly parallel builds from overloading machine resources (aside from the typical `-j` flag for controlling parallelism). Also, under proposal and queued are a query language, improvements to creating multi-platform builds, and IDE plugins.<p>It works on Linux, and should work in any POSIX&#x2F;Unix-compatible environment.<p>You&#x27;ll have to use pip (or pipx&#x2F;uv&#x2F;etc) to install it. We&#x27;re aiming to produce and distribute high quality self contained executables this year (there is a task defined in Makex&#x27;s Makexfile to produce such executables for yourself).<p>Take a look, test, and let me know what you think.<p>Thanks!

2 comments

nateskulic4 months ago
Oh, by the way, there were questions&#x2F;concerns about the non license before. Partly issues with our build&#x2F;deploy. We think we&#x27;ve resolved that. See: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hg.sr.ht&#x2F;~metacompany&#x2F;makex&#x2F;browse&#x2F;LICENSE.md?rev=tip" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hg.sr.ht&#x2F;~metacompany&#x2F;makex&#x2F;browse&#x2F;LICENSE.md?rev=ti...</a> :-)
ShredCode4 months ago
Interesting. MakeX has needed improvements for a while now. Can&#x27;t wait to give this a try.