Basic Overview

makemake is a lightweight/dependency-free C build system built entirely around standard POSIX tools. It brings a python-style virtual environment to your C projects using a simple shell script. It tracks your compiler, linker flags, project version, and build options in a local state file without needing cmake or other heavy build generators.

Example Use

To get started with a fresh project, create your directory and run the initialization command:

make init

Next, activate your virtual environment by sourcing the configuration script into your current shell session:

. config/activate (or source config/activate — the former is simply POSIX compliant).

Once you are inside the environment, you can run your builds and clean up whenever you want:

make debug make build make clean

What Each Build Target Does

• init sets up the required folder structure and generates the activation script.
• debug compiles your code using your configured debug flags (typically with debug symbols enabled and optimization turned off).
• build compiles your code using your configured build flags (typically used for optimized production binaries).
• clean removes all intermediate object files, generated makefiles, and output binaries.

Example env_set Commands

You can adjust your toolchain, compiler options, and project version dynamically using the env_set function while the environment is active.

Example uses:

• env_set CC cc
• env_set VERSION _v1.0.0
• env_set CFLAGS -std=c17 -pedantic -Wall -Wextra
• env_set DEBUG_FLAGS -g3 -O0
• env_set BUILD_FLAGS -O2 -DNDEBUG
• env_set LIBS -lm

Tips

1. If you update a .h file you MUST do a make clean before building again, otherwise the header changes will not be used.
2. If you remove a .c file, you MUST do a make clean or manually remove .o files, otherwise they will never be wiped (even if they are no longer linked, it will just waste some disk-space).