Recursive Make Considered Harmful!

I wish that headline was more commonly seen, but it's true. To prove that you can build a fast make system using only GNU make, with full, accurate cross dependencies, without using recursive make, I put together this little sample. It doesn't even need a "make depend" step to get the header dependencies right -- it just works!

Download makesample.zip (6 kB) and use it freely (MIT license).

You can also read the README without downloading (although the download is only 6 kB).

The original 1997 recursive make paper by Peter Miller provided some inspiration for this system. The fact that many UNIX build systems can't seem to get dependencies right (or spend an inordinate time doing so) was the final straw.