Show HN: Makex: A Modern Build/Automation Tool

4 points by nateskulic a year ago · 2 comments · 2 min read

Hi Everyone!

I want to show Makex, a modern build/automation tool.

It has been under development for approximately 1 year, receiving many improvements over this time.

Makex was designed to replace the original Make, and to supplant Bazel and other related build systems.

It's built for handling large monorepos, while keeping it open for a hybrid/mono/multi-repo future. It's also designed for safety, reproducibility, clarity, speed, incrementality, simplicity and more — the things you'd expect out of a modern build system.

We've written many Makex files internally, and it's replaced dozens of existing Makefiles among other build/automation scripts. It does everything it says it does. It is fairly mature at this point (but there is more work ahead).

There's a lot more in the feature pipeline. For example, we're adding task resource thresholding (or constraints) in the next release. As far as I know, no other build tool has an effective way to keep large highly parallel builds from overloading machine resources (aside from the typical `-j` flag for controlling parallelism). Also, under proposal and queued are a query language, improvements to creating multi-platform builds, and IDE plugins.

It works on Linux, and should work in any POSIX/Unix-compatible environment.

You'll have to use pip (or pipx/uv/etc) to install it. We're aiming to produce and distribute high quality self contained executables this year (there is a task defined in Makex's Makexfile to produce such executables for yourself).

Take a look, test, and let me know what you think.

Thanks!