SCons

SCons is a great make replacement written in Python. It offers the following goodies (and many more):

• Cross platform. Same script will compile your sources for Linux or Windows or ...


• Support many tools out of the box (such as gcc/VC/java/tar ...)


• Calculate if a file has change by digital signature
(and not by time stamp)

• Automatically cleans after itself (no more make clean)
  

Scons Makefile is called SConstruct, here is a simple one:

Program("hw", ["hw.c"])

Which tells scons to build an executable called hw from the source file hw.c

Calling scons on Linux will produce:

[15:10] /tmp/hw $scons
scons: Reading SConscript files ...
scons: done reading SConscript files.
scons: Building targets ...
gcc -o hw.o -c hw.c
gcc -o hw hw.o
scons: done building targets.
[15:10]

and on Windows it finds VC and invokes it:

C:\Temp\hw>scons
scons: Reading SConscript files ...
scons: done reading SConscript files.
scons: Building targets ...
cl /nologo /c hw.c /Fohw.obj
hw.c
link /nologo /OUT:hw.exe hw.obj
scons: done building targets.
C:\Temp\hw>

Cleaning is simple as well:

[15:19] /tmp/hw $scons -c
scons: Reading SConscript files ...
scons: done reading SConscript files.
scons: Cleaning targets ...
Removed hw.o
Removed hw
scons: done cleaning targets.
[15:19] /tmp/hw $

All of this in one line of SConstruct.

(Shameless plug: See here for a longer article on the subject)