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Dev tools · May 3, 2025

Open-lmake, a scalable, reliable build system with auto dep-tracking

Hello Hacker News, I often hear people saying "all build-systems suck", an opinion I have been sharing for years, and this is the motivation for this project. I finally got the opportunity to make it open-source, and here it is. In a few words, it is like make, except it can be comfortably used even in big projects using HPC (with millions of jobs, thousands of them running in parallel). The major differences are that: - dependencies are automatically tracked (no need to call gcc -M and the like, no need to be tailored to any specific tool, it just works) by spying disk activity - it is…

Open-lmake, a scalable, reliable build system with auto dep-tracking launched on May 3, 2025 with 6 votes and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.

What it does

Open-lmake is a generic, fearless build system. It is like make, except that it is user-friendly, versatile, scalable and reliable. - cesar-douady/open-lmake

Open-lmake is a generic and fearless build system running on Linux. It is like make , except that it is practical, versatile, scalable and reliable. It is reliable : never type make clean ever again. It is reproducible : never complain "does not work on my machine" ever again. For a quick comparison with well-known tools ( make , ninja , bazel , CMake ) , visit quick comparison . Using the vocabulary defined in Build Systems à la carte , open-lmake is correct, monadic, restarting, self-tracking, keeps verifying traces, implements parallel execution, does early cutoff and implements dynamically allocated keys. Optionally, it can keep constructive traces and be a cloud build system. Its major…from github.com

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hello Hacker News, I often hear people saying "all build-systems suck", an opinion I have been sharing for years, and this is the motivation for this project. I finally got the opportunity to make it open-source, and here it is. In a few words, it is like make, except it can be comfortably used even in big projects…

Does a similar job

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