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copied!<p>Let me stress one argument of Miller's paper: When you start to manually resolve dependency relationships between different modules and have a hard time to ensure the build order, you are effectively reimplementing the logic the build system was made to solve in the first place. <strong>Constructing reliable recursive make build systems is very hard.</strong> Real life projects have many interdependent parts whose build order is non-trivial to figure out and thus, this task should be left to the build system. However, it can only resolve that problem if it has global knowledge of the system.</p> <p>Furthermore, recursive make build-systems are prone to fall apart when building concurrently on multiple processors/cores. While these build systems may seem to work reliably on a single processor, many missing dependencies go undetected until you start to build your project in parallel. I've worked with a recursive make build system which worked on up to four processors, but suddenly crashed on a machine with two quad-cores. Then I was facing another problem: These <strong>concurrency issues</strong> are next to impossible to debug and I ended up drawing a flow-chart of the whole system to figure out what went wrong.</p> <p>To come back to your question, I find it hard to think of good reasons why one wants to use recursive make. The runtime performance of non-recursive GNU Make build systems is hard to beat and, quite the contrary, many recursive make systems have serious performance problems (weak parallel build support is again a part of the problem). There is a <a href="http://www.genode-labs.com/publications/scons-vs-make-2008.pdf" rel="noreferrer">paper</a> in which I evaluated a specific (recursive) Make build system and compared it to a SCons port. The performance results are not representative because the build system was very non-standard, but in this particular case the SCons port was actually faster.</p> <p>Bottom line: If you really want to use Make to control your software builds, go for non-recursive Make because it makes your life far easier in the long run. Personally, I would rather use SCons for usability reasons (or Rake - basically any build system using a modern scripting language and which has implicit dependency support).</p>

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