myke/index1.html at master · switham/myke · GitHub

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<head>
<title>myke: two percent of make</title>

<style type="text/css">
.firstletter
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float:left;
width:1.8em;
font-size:200%;
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</head>

<body>

<table width="100%" border="0">
  <tr>
    <td width="129" align="center">
       <img
        src="http://www.mac-guyver.com/switham/2010/03/Myke/myke2_thumb.png"
        width="109" border="0">

      </a></td>
    <td valign="top">
<p>
      <font size="+2">
<b><code>myke</code>: the 2% of <code>make</code>
      that does 50% of what I need</b>
     (in 374 lines of Python)</font>

<font size="-1"><p>version 0.1</font>
   </td>
  </tr>
</table>

<blockquote><font size="-1">
<i>It began with an elaborate idea of a dependency analyzer, boiled down to something much simpler, and turned into Make that weekend.</i><br>
--<a href="http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch15s04.html">Stuart Feldman</a>
</font></blockquote>

<p>
<span class="firstletter">See,</span>  my laptop currently has only one small functioning partition,
so I can't install the whole developer tools suite onto it.
I was working on some Java code on the laptop.
The project includes a <code>Makefile</code>, but I had to
compile by hand on the laptop.
<p>

I noticed the basic Mac OS X install includes <code>gcc</code>,
<code>javac</code>, <code>jar</code>, and <code>java</code>,
but not <code>make</code> (nor <code>ant</code> nor <code>SCons</code>).
That's when it occurred to me:
<blockquote>
"Gee, I don't do anything really...<i>complicated</i> with <code>make</code>..."
</blockquote>

So I spent nine hours on Saturday writing the gist of
<code>make</code> in Python.
At that point <code>myke</code> did all the basic
stuff I use <code>make</code> for in my own work.
Sunday I spent another nine hours futzing.
The flip side of diminishing returns is that the first 2% of a project
gives you an inflated opinion of yourself.
Yet another make-maker.

<p>
I've since found that although <code>gnumake</code> is compiled from about 70 times as many
source lines and bytes as <code>myke</code>, its compiled binary is only
about 300K bytes, and it does run when copied to my laptop
(no missing or incompatible libraries).  So <code>myke</code> has been a
diversion from what I was doing on Friday.

<p>
I modeled <code>myke</code> on <code>make</code>'s behavior,
rather than documentation or any opinions of my own.
It was nice having so few design questions or decisions to make.
One mystery is the difference between "nothing to be done for
'all'," and "target 'all' is up-to-date."  The latter seems to happen when
there were rules to run, but <code>make</code> didn't echo any of them to the
terminal.  You can trigger this by creating a rule with a line
beginning with a tab but otherwise blank.  <code>myke</code> doesn't
go for that.

<p>
I liked working on a program called "<code>myke</code>."  For instance there are
"raise MykeException" statements, and comments like "<code>myke</code> counts on it."

<p>
<table width="100%" border="0">
<tr>
<td>
<code>myke</code> is crazy like a fox, but not quite the character.<br>
<code>myke</code> uses McGuffin-based parsing.<br>
<code>myke</code> was inside of <code>make</code>,
looking for a way out.<br>
<code>myke</code> searches for significant whitespace.<br>
</td>
   <td width="129" align="center">
       <img
        src="http://www.mac-guyver.com/switham/2010/03/Myke/myke2_thumb.png"
        width="109" border="0">
     </td>
   </tr>
</table>


<p>
Here's the code <a href="myke">to download</a> and "inline" (take two they're small):
<hr>
<pre><font size="-1">