Products · Product
Make
Raised as a usability problem by 92 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 69 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
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Every issue, all time, most people first
Makefiles are so hard to write that almost nobody uses them correctlyUnreviewed
20102026- Adding new stuff to a makefile is annoying and less intuitive to read2026-04-03
- Makefile language is unintuitive and hard to learn2025-10-06
- Make's syntax is so arcane that people replace it with other tools2024-12-23
Dependencies must be declared manually, easy to get wrongUnreviewed
20102026- Failed dependency builds are silently ignored, making Make hostile to newcomers trying to understand it2023-01-11
- Dependencies must be declared manually, so it's easy to get wrong and break builds2020-10-27
- Make's error messages for missing dependencies and compiler version issues are cryptic2019-05-26
Invisible tab-versus-space errors and cryptic messages hinder debuggingUnreviewed
20102026- Hard to tell whether leading whitespace is a tab or spaces, causing errors2024-09-21
- Mixing a space and a tab breaks the build with a cryptic error that confuses beginners2023-07-16
- Spaces for indentation fail with a cryptic 'missing separator' error2016-06-20
Tabs as line prefixes and running everything as shell is awkwardUnreviewed
20102026- Tab-only indentation is annoying and makes make a pain for newcomers2025-07-17
- Tabs as line prefixes are a problem and running everything as a shell is awkward2020-08-17
- Significant tabs and bizarre punctuation syntax make Make hard to write correctly2018-02-28
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Adding new stuff to a makefile is annoying and less intuitive to read2026-04-03
- Makefile language is unintuitive and hard to learn2025-10-06
- Tab-only indentation is annoying and makes make a pain for newcomers2025-07-17
- Footguns, weird quirks and implicit behavior keep biting the user2025-05-29
- Make's syntax is so arcane that people replace it with other tools2024-12-23
- Makefile logic is opaque and hard to debug, mixing make and shell with no scoping2024-12-08
- Build steps that work with default -j1 break under -j4, and the fix was hard to find2024-12-04
- Incremental builds fail to rebuild on file changes, forcing users to remember manual workarounds2024-12-04
- Author keeps mixing up Makefile automatic variable symbols and forgetting their meanings2024-12-04
- Whitespace rules cause hours of hard-to-find debugging2024-09-21
- Hard to remember and search the many built-in variables in docs2024-09-21
- Hard to tell whether leading whitespace is a tab or spaces, causing errors2024-09-21
- Build systems become chaotic, cryptic, bloated and hard to learn beyond toy projects2024-09-21
- Makefiles are terse and hard to read, with confusing escape rules and awkward dependency expression2024-09-06
- Painful to use outside of producing C object files2024-08-24
- Makefile syntax is hard to write and read, cumbersome for dependency tracking2024-04-28
- Official build systems are cumbersome to wrangle when projects go off the beaten path2024-03-08
- Easy to accidentally write non-portable build rules that break elsewhere2024-01-02
- Tabs, spaces, continuation lines and whitespace-sensitive macros make writing makefiles error-prone2023-12-27
- Syntax takes trial and error and finding examples to learn2023-09-10
- Make's syntax is difficult to deal with and needs rules and flags that are hard to get right2023-07-16
- Mixing a space and a tab breaks the build with a cryptic error that confuses beginners2023-07-16
- Makefile-based builds are error prone and slow, so developers avoid doing them by hand2023-05-22
- Inconsistent and error-prone to use correctly and reliably across systems2023-05-16
- Makefiles are obtuse, with many ways to define variables and rules that are hard to debug2023-04-20
- Developers can't understand make, which feels like an arcane spell to chant2023-03-04
- Makefiles hide commands, so debugging failures needs ugly workarounds like sed or shell -x2023-01-17
- Make's features are horrible and complex, with a manual listing features but lacking motivation, forcing learning by painful experience2023-01-12
- Makefiles become hard to read with obscure flags and inscrutable commands2023-01-11
- Failed dependency builds are silently ignored, making Make hostile to newcomers trying to understand it2023-01-11
- Makefiles are hard to write and use, making builds frustrating2022-08-16
- Took forever to learn how rule names map to files, poorly documented in tutorials2022-08-12
- Writing Makefiles by hand is painful and gets ugly quickly2022-08-07
- Building out of tree and auto header dependencies need hacky tricks, not standard support2022-08-01
- Makefiles are so hard to write that almost nobody uses them correctly2022-04-27
- Makefiles are hard to read due to magic, inferred behavior and inconsistent conventions2022-04-26
- Parallel task output interleaves, making it impossible to view progress2022-03-14
- Developers constantly forget or mess up quoting rules and cryptic variables like $@ and $<2022-03-14
- Makefile language is non-intuitive, hard for other engineers to pick up2021-03-22
- Projects skip the standard DESTDIR convention, so install goes straight into the system2021-01-17
- Dependencies must be declared manually, so it's easy to get wrong and break builds2020-10-27
- Tabs as line prefixes are a problem and running everything as a shell is awkward2020-08-17
- Tracking non-file state needs hidden intermediate files that drift from reality2020-06-10
- Dependencies often not captured completely, so people resort to make clean2020-06-10
- Hard to learn its DSL and to debug makefiles2020-06-10
- Makefiles have many pains and gotchas that make them hard to use correctly2020-05-15
- Forgetting to mark targets .PHONY causes subtle build bugs2020-05-15
- Make has poor UX and is hard to use for builds2019-12-10
- Expressing anything beyond simple cases is confusing and hard to read2019-11-19
- Makefile syntax is obtuse, with magic a newcomer must copy without understanding2019-10-29