I do most of my work in the console, and when I work on a task, I
usually have a task-specific Makefile.
The other day at work, I returned in a repository where I worked before
and I wanted to check if there was any Makefile left from the previous
tasks in there, so I said:
$ find . -name Makefile
What do you think I found? — 48 matches, all but one in node_modules.
Wow! I never thought make was that popular among JavaScripters. =)
I wondered then, how many of the popular Node modules use make. So I
went to GitHub, and looked through their API docs, and put together a
little shell script to find that.
I picked the top 1000 most starred JavaScript repositories on GitHub,
and looked for Makefile, Gruntfile.js, Jakefile, and
gulpfile.js. Here are the numbers:
Jakefile — 393
Gruntfile.js — 244
Makefile — 142
gulpfile.js — 130
So yeah, make is still pretty popular. In fact, I have looked at
make as a build tool after I saw it used by a famous ex-JavaScripter.
I was impressed, I’m happily using it as my default since then. 8-)