1 Topic by ecanot (edited by ecanot 2016-04-30 12:08:56)

Topic: Open Watcom Make versus GNU Make

Hi Jeff,

I'm used to write my own Makefiles under linux using gmake (GNU Make).

I know that there is a different Make command under Simply Fortran (wmake, from Open Watcom), but IMHO
it is less reliable and has less power than gmake. More specifically, there is no wildcard feature with wmake
to automatically set a variable with all the files present in a specified folder :
   OBJS = $(wildcard build/*.o)
and this is like a neckbottle for me.

Do you plan to switch to the GNU make version ? Or at least propose an option to use one of them ?

Regards,
Édouard

  • jeff
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Re: Open Watcom Make versus GNU Make

Édouard,

We do not plan on switching away from Open Watcom Make.  The Open Watcom tool is far more tolerant of the Windows environment (it properly handles backslashes, for example), and our environment is tailored towards its syntax at this point.  We do plan on elminating a reliance on any Make tools in version 3.0, though, when work begins on that next major version.  Much of what is necessary to behave as a Make system is already present in Simply Fortran anyways.

GNU Make for Windows is readily available, however.  There is no reason you wouldn't be able to download a MinGW version of GNU Make to use with Simply Fortran.  With some changes to our Makefiles, it would work properly.  Are you authoring Makefiles by hand to use from the command line with our compilers?  I'm just curious about your use case.

Jeff Armstrong
Approximatrix, LLC