fboulnois / modern-makefile

Set it and forget it -- throw it in a C/C++ project and type `make`

A Modern Makefile for C and C++

Set it and forget it -- throw it in a C/C++ project and type make

Motivation

Building a C/C++ project should be as simple as typing a single command.

Unfortunately, C/C++ projects often use byzantine, brittle, and bespoke Makefiles or instead use elaborate or exotic build systems¹.

Make is a venerable, versatile, and nearly universal build system, but it is missing a universal C/C++ Makefile!

The solution is a simple, reusable, and cross-platform Makefile for C/C++. It supports small, medium, and large C/C++ projects in less than 130 lines of Make.

Features

• Supports building mixed C and C++ projects
• Rebuilds objects which depend on headers when headers are modified
• Supports make all, make clean, and make objects out-of-the-box
• Build flag defaults to enhance the security of executable (overridable)
• Automatically builds everything in the current directory (overridable)
• Automatically names the build as the parent directory (overridable)
• Automatically builds an executable or shared library with the right file extension (overridable)
• Ability to debug Makefile variables
• Documentation for each Makefile section

Compatibility

This Makefile should work on any machine that has at least GNU Make 3.8 (from 2002!)² and various flavors of OpenBSD and FreeBSD Make.

It has been explicitly tested on the following versions of Mac, Linux, and Windows:

• MacOS 10.6 and later
• Linux
  • Ubuntu 12.04 and later
  • Alpine 3.2 and later
  • RHEL/CentOS 7 and later
  • Fedora 20 and later
• Windows 7 and later
  • Cygwin
  • Mingw32/64
  • MSYS2
  • WSL1/2

Adding includes and external libraries

Includes should be added to the MY_CFLAGS variable of the Makefile. For example, if your program requires certain headers from /usr/local/include:

CFLAGS  = -I/usr/local/include

Libraries should be added to the MY_LIBS variable of the Makefile. For example, if your program uses <math.h>, you may need to link the libm library:

MY_LIBS   = -lm

Similarly, if you have a library in a custom path, this path should be added to the MY_LIBS variable before the library:

MY_LIBS   = -L/usr/local/lib -lz

Notes

¹ I get sad every time I need to use CMake, Autotools, Bazel, Ninja, Premake, Meson, Cake, qmake, Rake, or SCons 😭 (Tup and xmake are cool but rare)

² I am not sure when I originally wrote it, but I have been using it since at least 2014.