Smake, a new set of implicit rules for Make

smake

smake is a simple Makefile generator which requires little to no configuration. I view it sort of as a version of make with a new, more modern set of implicit goals.

Install

Just put the smake script somewhere in your PATH .

curl 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mortie/smake/master/smake' | sudo tee /usr/local/bin/smake && sudo chown +x /usr/local/bin/smake

Usage

The smake command works very similarly to make . Run smake -h for help output.

Making a smake-compatible project

Smake makes a few assumptions about your project:

• All C files must end in .c , all C++ files in .cc .
• All headers must end in .h .
• All source code and private headers should go in src .
• All public headers, if applicable, should go in include .
• Each Smake project produces exactly one executable or library (though a project can depend on other smake projects in other directories).

The Smakefile

When running smake , it will look for a file called Smakefile in the current directory, like make looks for Makefile . This file uses Make's syntax, and is imported from the generated Makefile. The smake tool itself also reads it to extract a few values from it.

Any make code is valid in the Smakefile, so you can define your own targets or do whatever you want to do, but the most common use case is to set variable.

You may want to take a look at a generated Makefile to get a feel for what variables and target exists and how they interact with each other.

PROJNAME

This is the name of your project, determining the name of the executable/library which will be generated.

Default: For convenience when experimenting or prototyping, PROJNAME defaults to the name of the current directory, but any serious project should set it explicitly. A warning will be printed if it's not set.

PROJTYPE

The type of the project. The possible values are:

• exe : An executable.
• solib : A shared library.
• alib : A static library.
• lib : A library where both a .a and a .so is generated.

Default: exe

PKGS

A list of pkg-config packages you depend on.

DEPENDS

A list of paths to other smake projects you depend on.

WARNINGS

Warning flags.

Default: -Wall -Wextra -Wno-unused-parameter

CONFIG

The current build configuration. Treat this as a read-only property; it's meant to be set when running smake .

Default: release

CCOPTS / LDOPTS

CCOPTS is flags for the C or C++ compiler, LDOPTS for the linker.

CCOPTS defaults: -Iinclude , and -isystem flags for any dependencies you may have

LDOPTS defaults: -L flags for any library dependencies you may have

Build configurations

Smake introduces the concept of build configurations. To define a new build configuration, let's call it myconfig , set the variables CCOPTS_myconfig and LDOPTS_myconfig . $(CCOPTS_$(CONFIG)) is included in the CFLAGS / CXXFLAGS variables, $(LDOPTS_$(CONFIG)) is included in LDFLAGS , so when someone runs your project with smake CONFIG=myconfig (or make CONFIG=myconfig ), your new build options will be used.

Build configs are built into the directory $(BUILDDIR)/$(CONFIG) (that is, build/$(CONFIG) ), so cleaning before building with a new config is generally not necessary.

A build config for a testing build using Snow would for example generally just consist of CCOPTS_testing = -DSNOW_ENABLED .