Make-It-Quick (MIQ)

A simple makefile-based build system for C / C++ programs

Features

Make-It-Quick is a simple build system destined to make it easy to build C or C++ programs without having to write lengthy makefiles or going through the complexity of tools such as automake or cmake. It is well suited for relatively small programs, although it has been used for at least one much larger program.

• Very short and readable makefiles offering all the most useful features
• Compact size (about 500 lines of active makefile code for a typical build)
• Fast, since short makefiles with few rules are quickly parsed
• Automatic, incremental project configuration, generating a config.h file
• Automatic logging of detailed build commands in log files
• Product testing with make test
• Product installation with make install
• Compact, colorized progress report
• Summary of errors and warnings at end of build
• Colorization of error and warning messages
• Rules to build various targets (optimized, debug, release, profile)
• Rule modifiers for common build options, e.g. v-debug for verbose debug
• Personal preferences easily defined with environment variables
• Built-in help (make help)
• Pure make, allowing you to use all standard Makefile syntax and features
• Automatic, single-pass generation of header-file dependencies
• Supports parallel builds
• Supports separate libraries, to accelerate builds (libraries are only built the first time, unless you request a "deep" build)
• Portable (tested on Linux, macOS and Windows platforms)

You can find examples of how 'Make-It-Quick' is used in other projects:

• SPICE - Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments
• Flight recorder
• XL programming language
• ELFE programming language
• XL reboot

Using Make-It-Quick

To use make-it-quick, you create a Makefile. A minimal makefile only needs to specify the name of the SOURCES, the name of the build PRODUCTS, and include the make-it-quick/rules.mk file, which contains the makefile rules:

MIQ=make-it-quick/
SOURCES=my-super-tool.cpp helper.c
PRODUCTS=my-super-tool.exe
include $(MIQ)rules.mk

That's all you need to get started. There is a small sample Makefile in this distribution.

In order to get a summary of the available build targets, use make help.

Using Make-It-Quick as a submodule or integrated in a project

In case you want to add Make-It-Quick to a project without adding another dependency, you can add Make-It-Quick as a submodule of your project, or copy it directly in your project. In that case, you would set the MIQ variable to point to a location of the make-it-quick directory relative to the makefiles, for example:

TOP=../
MIQ=$(TOP)make-it-quick/
SOURCES=my-super-tool.cpp helper.c
PRODUCTS=my-super-tool.exe
include $(MIQ)rules.mk

Building libraries and shared libraries

The kind of output your makefile produces depends on the extension in PRODUCTS. You can use:

• .exe for an executable binary
• .lib for a static library
• .dll for a dynamic library

The build commands for each case are defined in build environment configurations, e.g. config.gnu.mk, by variables called MAKE_EXE, MAKE_LIB and MAKE_DLL. The actual extension being used are also defined in the same file, as EXE_EXT, LIB_EXT and DLL_EXT. For example, on Linux, LIB_EXT is set to .a.

Building the products

If you simply type make, a default build is launched. This is what you should see if you do that in the make-it-quick directory itself:

make-it-quick> make

****************************************************************
* The BUILDENV environment variable is not set
* You will accelerate builds by setting it as appropriate for
* your system. The best guess is BUILDENV=macosx-clang
* Attempting to build opt with macosx-clang DIR=/make-it-quick
****************************************************************

[BEGIN]              opt macosx-clang in [top]/make-it-quick
[GENERATE]           CONFIG_HAVE_stdio.c
[CONFIG]             stdio
[GENERATE]           CONFIG_HAVE_unistd.c
[CONFIG]             unistd
[GENERATE]           CONFIG_HAVE_nonexistent.c
[CONFIG]             nonexistent
[GENERATE]           CONFIG_HAVE_sys.sl.time.c
[CONFIG]             sys.sl.time
[GENERATE]           CONFIG_HAVE_sys.sl.improbable.c
[CONFIG]             sys.sl.improbable
[GENERATE]           CONFIG_HAVE_iostream.cpp
[CONFIG]             iostream
[COPY]               config/check_clearenv.c => objects/macosx-clang/opt/make-it-quick/CONFIG_CHECK_clearenv.c
[CONFIG]             clearenv
[GENERATE]           CONFIG_LIBm.c
[CONFIG]             libm
[GENERATE]           CONFIG_LIBoony.c
[CONFIG]             liboony
[COPY]               config/check_sbrk.c => objects/macosx-clang/opt/make-it-quick/CONFIG_CHECK_sbrk.c
[CONFIG]             sbrk
[GENERATE]           config.h
[COMPILE  1/1]       hello.cpp
[BUILD]              hello
[END]                opt macosx-clang in [top]/make-it-quick

real	0m2.243s
user	0m1.206s
sys	0m0.750s

The output of the build will be located by default in the top-level directory for the build, or the directory specified by the OUTPUT environment variable if it's set.

Temoprary files are placed in the .objects directory, or the directory set by the OBJFILES environment variable if it's set. There are subdirectories corresponding to the build environment and the build target, so the final product could be for instance under .objects/macosx-clang/opt/hello. This is explained below.

The log files will be located by default in .logs, the latest one being called make.log, or in the directory specified by the LOGS environment variable.

You can clean the build products with make clean and force a clean build with make rebuild.

Build tips

The makefiles are self-documented. You can get information about the avaiable build targets using make help, and add your own documentation by adding dependencies to the help target.

There are three primary build targets, debug, opt and release, which are described in detail below. Build objects for these primary targets are kept in separate locations, so that you can quickly alternate between debug and optimized builds.

You can customize your build using either command-line variables or target prefixes. Here are some examples:

make v-debug          # Verbose debug build using v- prefix
make V=1 debug        # Verbose build using variable
make nocolor-debug    # Do not colorize output (prefix)
make COLORIZE= debug  # Do not colorize output (variable)
make notime-debug     # Do not collect build time (prefix)
make TIME= debug      # Do not collect build time (variable)

You can build the target you prefer by default by setting the TARGET environment variable, e.g.

export TARGET=notime-nocolor-debug
make                  # Builds a 'notime-nocolor-debug'

Testing the products

Use make test or make check to test the product. The check target ensures that everything is rebuilt before testing.

The simplest possible test is to simply run the generated program. You can do this by adding a TESTS variable to your Makefile:

SOURCES=hello.cpp
PRODUCTS=hello.exe
TESTS=product
include make-it-quick/rules.mk

If you run make test (or make check) on the sample makefile found in the distribution directory, you will run the hello program, after building it if necessary:

 build> make test
 [BEGIN]              opt macosx-clang in [top]/build
 [COMPILE  1/1]       hello.cpp
 [BUILD]              hello
 [TEST]               product
 You successfully built using build
 Output has 35 characters, should be 35

As you can see in the sample Makefile, it is easy to add tests, simply by adding a rule that ends in .test. In the sample file, it is called count-characters.test.

Building for debugging, release or profiling

The default build is an optimized build similar to what you would achieve by running make opt. It is well optimized, but still retains some debugging capabilities. The DEBUG and OPTIMIZED macros are defined.

If you need more debugging capabilities, you can create a debug build by using make debug. This disables most optimizations, making it easier for the debugger to relate machine code to source code. The DEBUG macro is defined for these builds.

If you want to remove all debugging symbols, you can generate a release build by using make release. In that configuration, the NDEBUG, OPTIMIZED and RELEASE flags are defined.

Finally, you can build for profiling using make profile and benchmark the result using make benchmark. This is still only partially tested and supported.

This list is likely to evolve over time, most notably with support for Valgrind and other debug / analysis tools.

Installing the product

To install the product, use make install. This often requires super-user privileges.

build> make install
[INSTALL]            opt macosx-clang in [top]/build
[INSTALL]            hello in /usr/local/bin

Build modifiers

Several built target modifiers can be used to modify the meaning of a following target. For example, the v- prefix disables output filtering, so that you can see the complete build commands:

 build> make v-debug
 [...]
 [BEGIN]              debug macosx-clang in [top]/build
 g++ -std=gnu++0x                             -DCONFIG_MACOSX -DDEBUG   -g -Wall -fno-inline           -c hello.cpp -o objects/macosx-clang/debug/build/hello.cpp.o
 g++ -o objects/macosx-clang/debug/hello ./objects/macosx-clang/debug/build/hello.cpp.o   -framework CoreFoundation -framework CoreServices  -g
 [END]                debug macosx-clang in [top]/build

Note that this is not normally necessary, since the build commands are preserved automatically in the build log every time you use make.

The build targets can be used also as build modifiers. For example, if you do make clean, you only clean opt objects since this is the default target. If you want to clean debug objects, use make debug-clean. Similarly, you can do a release install with make release-install.

Note that you can make debug your default target by setting the TARGET environment variable, see below.

Environment variables

Several environment variables control the behavior of make-it-quick. The variables that can be configured are found at the beginning of config.mk. Note that all directory names should end with a trailing /. Some of the most useful environment variables include:

• BUILDENV specifies the build environment, for example macosx-clang when building on MacOSX with Clang. Parameters for this build environment are defined in config.$(BUILDENV).mk, for example config.macosx-clang.mk. If not set, heuristics defined in config.auto.mk are used to try and determine the correct BUILDENV.

• TARGET specifies the default build target, which can be opt, debug, release or profile at the moment. If you often build debug targets, you only need to export TARGET=debug, and the default make will become equivalent to make debug.

• PREFIX specifies the installation location. You can also specify the installation location for executables (PREFIX_BIN), libraries (PREFIX_LIB) or shared libraries (PREFIX_DLL). For compatibility with automake-generated makefiles, you can also execute a staged install by setting DESTDIR when running make.

• TOP is the top-level directory for the build, which defaults to the directory in which make is started.

• OUTPUT is the directory where all build products should go. The default is the $(TOP).

• OBJFILES is the directory where all build intermediate files should go. The default is .objects/ in `$(TOP)

• LOGS is the directory where all logs should go. The default is .logs/ in $(TOP).

Hierarchical projects

Often, a project is made of several directories or libraries. In make-it-quick, this is supported with two makefile variables:

• SUBDIRS lists subdirectories of the top-level directory that must be built every time.

• LIBRARIES lists libraries, which can be subdirectories or not, which the products depends on. Each library should end in either .lib or .dll to indicate if it's to be shared statically or dynamically. Note that the PRODUCTS in the corresponding subdirectory should match and produce the correct output.

• TOP is the top-level directory, which is used for example when you build make top-debug.

Subdirectories are re-built everytime a top-level build is started, whereas libraries are re-built only if they are missing. It is possible to force a re-build of libraries using the d- or deep- prefix for builds, for example make deep-debug.

Project configuration

Often, projects have dependencies on specific features that are only available on some platforms or after installing specific dependencies. Tools such as autoconf and automake address this problem in a separate build step.

The make-it-quick configuration step is designed to generate a config.h file with a content that is close enough to the output of autoconf to allow a same project to be adapted for make-it-quick with minimal changes in the source code.

In make-it-quick, you specify the configuration dependencies using the CONFIG variable, which will define the various conditions you want to test for. The result of the tests will be stored in a config.h header file.

Here is an example from the sample Makefile:

CONFIG= <stdio.h>                  \
        <unistd.h>                 \
        <nonexistent.h>            \
        <sys/time.h>               \
        <sys/improbable.h>         \
        <iostream>                 \
        clearenv                   \
        libm                       \
        liboony                    \
        sbrk

Here is what the generated config.h might look like:

#define HAVE_STDIO_H 1
#define HAVE_UNISTD_H 1
/* #undef HAVE_NONEXISTENT_H */
#define HAVE_SYS_TIME_H 1
/* #undef HAVE_SYS_IMPROBABLE_H */
#define HAVE_IOSTREAM 1
/* #undef HAVE_CLEARENV */
#define HAVE_LIBM 1
/* #undef HAVE_LIBOONY */
#define HAVE_SBRK 1
#define CONFIG_SBRK_BASE ((void *) 0x104ab3000)

The following configuration options are recognized:

• C header files, such as <stdio.h>
• C++ header files, such as <iostream>
• Function names, such as clearenv or sbrk
• Library names, such as libm

For function names, a source file in the config/ subdirectory will specify how you test for the given function, and possibly return additional output that will be integrated in the config.h file. The file name begins with check_ followed by the function being tested, and can be located either in the make-it-quick directory, or in the project directory. The build/config directory contains a few examples of such tests for simple functions.

For example, the config/check_sbrk.c file contains the following:

#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
    printf("#define CONFIG_SBRK_BASE ((void *) %p)\n", sbrk(0));
    return 0;
}

Note that the example adds a #define CONFIG_SBRK_BASE in the config.h. This is only for illustration purpose, since modern systems attempt to randomize address space, making the value returned by sbrk(0) different with each run.

Package dependencies

A make-it-quick project can depend on other packages and use pkg-config to easily get the required compilation or link flags. The PKGCONFIGS variable lists the name of the required packages. if the name ends with ?, the package is optional, and the build with succceed even if the package is not present.

For example, PKGCONFIGS may look like this, in which case packages pixman-1 and gstreamer-1.0 are required, whereas package openssl is optional.

PKGCONFIGS=     pixman-1                    \
                openssl?                    \
                gstreamer-1.0

Other stuff

There a few utility targets, in particular:

• clang-format reformats all sources specified in CLANG_FORMAT_SOURCES (which defaults to SOURCES and HDR_INSTALL)

Redistribution

The make-it-quick project is released under the GNU General Public License version 3. The project author's reading of said license is that it only "contaminates" derivative products, but not products created using the product. In other words:

• Creating derivative software, e.g. a 'nanotoconf' project that uses make-it-quick code, requires you to comply with the GPL, and in particular to redistribute your code in source form. The fact that it's really hard to distribute makefiles in binary form should help you comply with this anyway :-)

• Building software using make-it-quick does not make that software GPL, any more than building it using GCC or GNU Make. I believe that make-it-quick can legally be used for proprietary software or for software using any other open-source license.

As long as I (Christophe de Dinechin) am the sole author / maintainer of this software, this interpretation will prevail. If you believe that I am in error in my understanding of the GPL v3, please send me e-mail or raise an issue on GitHub or GitLab, and I will add a licensing exception to that effect.

Comparing build vs. autoconf on a real project