Why is no one using make for Java?

Question

Just about every Java project that I\'ve seen either uses Maven or Ant. They are fine tools and I think just about any project can use them. But what ever happened to make

Answer 1

I've never used GNU Make for Java projects, but I used to use jmk. Sadly it hasn't been updated since 2002.

It had some Java-specific functionality but was small enough to include in your source tarball without significantly increasing its size.

Nowadays I just assume any Java developer I share code with has Ant installed.

Answer 2

The venerable make program handles separately compiled languages like C and C++ reasonably well. You compile a module, it uses #include to pull in the text of other include files, and writes a single object file as output. The compiler is very much a one-at-a-time system, with a separate linking step to bind the object files into an executable binary.

However, in Java, the compiler has to actually compile other classes that you import with import. Although it would be possible to write something that generated all the necessary dependencies from Java source code, so that make would build classes in the correct order one at a time, this still wouldn't handle cases such as circular dependencies.

The Java compiler can also be more efficient by caching the compiled results of other classes while compiling further classes that depend on the results of ones already compiled. This sort of automatic dependency evaluation is not really possible with make alone.

Answer 3

All the other answers about the technical merits of each are true. Ant and Maven may be better suited to Java than make, or as Hank Gay points out, they may not :)

However, you asked if it matters that Ant and Maven are written in Java. Although on StackOverflow we don't consider such thoughts (closed! not-programming-related! etc.), OF COURSE THAT'S PART OF THE THING. On rails we use Rake, C dudes use make, and in Java we use Ant and Maven. While it's true that the Ant or Maven developers will look after the Java developer perhaps better than others, there's also another question: what do you write Ant tasks in? Java. If you're a Java developer, that's an easy fit.

So yeah, part of it is to use tools written in the language you are tooling.

Answer 4

Make scripts tend to be inherently platform dependent. Java is supposed to be platform independent. Therefore having a build system that only works on one platform for a multi-platform sourcebase is kindof a problem.

Answer 5

Unless I am no one the assumption no one is (mis)using make for java is wrong.

"Managing Projects with GNU Make" (available under GFDL) contains a complete chapter dedicated to using make with java projects.

As it contains a long (and hopefully fair) list of the pros and cons of using make instead of other tools you might want to take a look there. (see: http://oreilly.com/catalog/make3/book/)