Build Automation Tools

“Make” is a build automation tool commonly used in software development to compile source code and create executable programs or other output files. It automates the process of building complex software projects, including compiling source code, linking object files, and creating executable files or other types of output.

In this article I cover the following: targets and prerequisites, variables, recipes to build an out of date target and finally an example of how to use it in a simple C++ project.

CMake is a cross-platform build system generator of Makefiles, projects specify their build process with platform-independent CMake listfiles included in each directory of a source tree with the name CMakeLists.txt. This article explains how to use CMake to build projects.