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WHAT IS WAKE ?

wake is a build utility based on GNU make. It provides a bunch of additional features, such as new command-line options, tenths of new functions (ie, dynamic variables) and some enhancements to the existing make utility.

WHY YET ANOTHER MAKE UTILITY ?

I'm using make since the late 80's ; during all that time, while designing new Makefiles for my projects, I can recall that I said to myself at least a thousand times : "Oh, it would really be comfortable if the make utility could provide me with this and that feature".

So one day, I decided to really implement all the ideas I had had during all these years on top of the make utility. This is how wake was born.

The starting point was that in one of my projects, I needed a variable that increments each time it was expanded. It was a good reason for me to implement all of the above.

The final reason for yet anoter make utility is : for the fun !

WHAT IS THE CURRENT VERSION ?

The current version of wake is 1.0.0, based on GNU make 4.1. See the WAKE.HISTORY.md file for more information on release contents.

SUPPORTED ENVIRONMENTS

For the moment, Wake has been compiled and tested in the following environments :

• Windows 7 64-bits, using Cygwin 64-bits

There is a plan to package Wake on pure Windows and Linux platforms.

WHAT ARE THE MAIN FEATURES OF WAKE ?

wake provides the following extensions to the existing make command (for more detailed information, have a look at the WAKE.help.md help file).

• Core :

  • The concept of "here documents" (such as it can be found in shell or php scripts) has been introduced ; You can, for example, define variables using here documents :

      TARGETS 	=  <<END
      			main.c
      			utilities.c
      			glob.c
      END
    

    Note that here documents are also implemented for rules. The idea is to group rule commands into a single shell script before execution. However, in the current version, this feature is partially functional ; it works for variable definitions, but does not have the intended functionnality for rules, which was to group commands within a shell script before executing them.

  • Multiline comments : they are introduced by the sequence "#/*" and terminated by "*/#".

  • Variable names support a wider range of characters, including the following ones :

    <>.[]~-_&+=/%*|^!

  • Regarding the C language, the C preprocessor and the make utility (and others), I always hated the fact that the backslash character, used to introduce continuation lines, would have to be followed by a newline character, and nothing else. I spent too many time rerunning a compilation, because there was a continuation line in which spaces where present between the backslash and the newline ; was it so hard to consider spaces after a backslash as inert characters until a newline is met ? this is why wake allows for spaces and tabs between the backslash of the continuation line and the newline character.

• A bunch of extension functions that provide additional features for :

  • String manipulation
  • List manipulation
  • Arithmetic functions
  • Logical functions
  • ... and various other functions, such as defining an auto-increment counter, generating a GUID, etc.