Compiling software, or building it, is a process that is done over and over again, making build automation one of the earliest tasks in software development. Introduced in April 1976 by Stuart Feldman at Bell Labs, Make was first used internally.
Over time, Make became a widely used tool for software developers, making it easier to manage complex software projects. However, the original implementation of Make was limited in its ability to handle file dependencies and limited in the abilitt to handle more complex build processes.
The Free Software Foundation developed ‘GNU make’, which expanded on the capabilities of the original make program.
GNU make was released under an open source license, which allowed developers to modify and redistribute the code freely. This is discussed in the history of the GNU project.
The popularity of Make led to the creation of many alternative implementations, including BSD Make (pmake, bmake, fmake), Microsoft nmake, Sun’s distributed dmake, and others. I also influenced Apache Ant in 2000, Rake, MSBuid and many others.
Today, make continues to be widely used in software development, particularly in the Unix and Linux communities. Its popularity can be attributed to its simplicity, flexibility, and open-source nature.
Most Make frameworks are based on two parts: a program, often called make, and a control file, sometimes called Makefile, which together build executable programs and libraries from source code by reading the file called Makefile. The Makefile is the receipt that tells make what and how to compile and its dependencies.