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Make

Make (most commonly GNU Make today) is a build automation tool originally created at Bell Labs in 1976, now maintained as a free/open-source GNU project. It ranks #10 among build/dev tools in developer usage surveys at roughly 23.2% share, making it one of the oldest tools still in everyday use. Developers use it because it reads a plain-text "Makefile" describing targets, their file dependencies, and the shell commands to build them — then only rebuilds what actually changed, saving time on large C/C++ and scripting projects.

Quick facts
Type: Build automation / task runner
Made by: Originally Bell Labs (Stuart Feldman); today maintained as GNU Make by the Free Software Foundation
License: Free / open-source (GPL)
Platforms/Hosting: Cross-platform, Unix-native (Linux, macOS, WSL/MinGW on Windows)
Primary use case: Compiling C/C++ projects and running dependency-aware build/ops scripts from a single Makefile

Jump to: Example Getting started Best for

Example

A Makefile defines targets, the files they depend on, and the shell command to run when those dependencies are newer than the target.

# Makefile — build a C program only when sources change
CC = gcc
CFLAGS = -Wall -O2

app: main.o utils.o
	$(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o app main.o utils.o

main.o: main.c utils.h
	$(CC) $(CFLAGS) -c main.c

utils.o: utils.c utils.h
	$(CC) $(CFLAGS) -c utils.c

.PHONY: clean
clean:
	rm -f *.o app

Getting started

Make ships with most Linux/macOS toolchains already; on Windows it's usually installed alongside a build toolchain like MinGW or via WSL.

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install build-essential

# check it's installed
make --version

# run the default target in the current directory's Makefile
make

Best for: C/C++ projects and any codebase (including polyglot ops/scripting repos) that needs a lightweight, dependency-aware way to rebuild only what changed, without pulling in a heavier language-specific build system.