It seems biased that only GitHub was scraped, that seems like it would mostly exclude systems linked to other forges like GitLab CI.
mcny · 7h ago
I used gitlab.com CI a lot but then at some point all the restrictions started and now it is not worth it trying to figure out how much quota is enough, especially for small personal projects. I don't remember the last time I wrote a git lab CI yaml file.
dijit · 8h ago
I know there's all kinds of biases in what we see.
But, from a european gamedev standpoint, I have never worked in a company that professionally depended on github-actions.
All I ever saw was Gitlab-CI and Jenkins (and a small instance of buildbot).
So seeing the absolute dominance of github-actions is somewhat jarring to me and doesn't paint a picture of my lived reality.
That said; none of what I'm talking about is open source - but I would expect to see more gitlab-ci in this list.
EconomistFar · 7h ago
Cool comparison. Both guys helped shape early computing but in totally different ways, one pushing from the garage, the other from within the system. It’s a good reminder that innovation doesn’t follow one path and impact isn’t always loud or obvious at first.
camilomatajira · 6h ago
Make is still king in 2025.
I don't understand why someone would use Just or Taskfile instead of Make.
My only hypothesis is that people believe (erroneously) that whatever is new is automatically better than what is older.
andreynering · 4h ago
Task creator here.
At the time I created it, I worked on Windows more often and I had a lot of trouble trying to find a Make build that works fine on Windows. The ones available for Windows are usually incompatible with the GNU version. So cross-platform support is one advantage of alternative tools.
Other than that, Task has a lot of features, so some use cases are not covered by Make.
That said, I'm not a Make hater. If it works for you, that's absolutely fine. Many people has found value in Task, though.
anentropic · 5h ago
The readme on Just repo explains pretty well why it's better than Make for the things people often misuse Make for, and why it's not intended for the use case that Make was originally built for.
camilomatajira · 5h ago
I read Just's readme the other day.
Basically they say Just is better than Make because in Just all targets are phony by default (something you can make easily in Make). And because they provide a flag to list the targets (which you can make easily in Make).
And because Make is to too complex to differentiate between = and := (which as an user almost always gives you the same result, even if you don't understand the difference). These are basically the reasons, which are not convincing for me.
Anyway, 26K people find
dijit · 3h ago
New = Better is indeed stupid but that's not whats happening here.
Make is a really powerful tool, with an expressive language that is quite esoteric with a bunch of idiosyncrasies (just like bash).
Most people are using Make as a task runner and it really falls short of the mark on this aspect. It can work, just like you can write a webserver in bash, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who would consider it to be a good idea.
Most people also conclude that "Well, Make is installed on everyones machine", but this also isn't true, it's an optional package and we often find ourselves installing it without much thought; making you believe that it was always included (I've done this plenty of times myself).
Make is not a task runner, it's a build system. You give it a bunch of files that need to be generated, and how to generate them; then you tell it which steps depend on which and voila! Make solves it for you.
How freaking cool is that?!! The price we pay is high (Yet another idiosyncratic language that we have to deal with), and that price is higher if we're not actually getting the value out of the freaking thing either.
I mean, wouldn't it be great if we had a Make that was more bash-compatible? That had easy discoverability of rules (maybe with a --list option to just targets?), that was more cross-platform and that supported parallel execution... Oh and golly, it would be lovely to have conditional logic - and since we're not using the build graph, or generating known artefacts, maybe we can remove those things and leave it up to our other build tools like Cargo, docker or Go?
Well, as it turns out, Just has those things, and operates this way. It's essentially what we keep using Make for; instead of using Make for what Make was actually made for.
But, from a european gamedev standpoint, I have never worked in a company that professionally depended on github-actions.
All I ever saw was Gitlab-CI and Jenkins (and a small instance of buildbot).
So seeing the absolute dominance of github-actions is somewhat jarring to me and doesn't paint a picture of my lived reality.
That said; none of what I'm talking about is open source - but I would expect to see more gitlab-ci in this list.
At the time I created it, I worked on Windows more often and I had a lot of trouble trying to find a Make build that works fine on Windows. The ones available for Windows are usually incompatible with the GNU version. So cross-platform support is one advantage of alternative tools.
Other than that, Task has a lot of features, so some use cases are not covered by Make.
That said, I'm not a Make hater. If it works for you, that's absolutely fine. Many people has found value in Task, though.
Anyway, 26K people find
Make is a really powerful tool, with an expressive language that is quite esoteric with a bunch of idiosyncrasies (just like bash).
Most people are using Make as a task runner and it really falls short of the mark on this aspect. It can work, just like you can write a webserver in bash, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who would consider it to be a good idea.
Most people also conclude that "Well, Make is installed on everyones machine", but this also isn't true, it's an optional package and we often find ourselves installing it without much thought; making you believe that it was always included (I've done this plenty of times myself).
Make is not a task runner, it's a build system. You give it a bunch of files that need to be generated, and how to generate them; then you tell it which steps depend on which and voila! Make solves it for you.
How freaking cool is that?!! The price we pay is high (Yet another idiosyncratic language that we have to deal with), and that price is higher if we're not actually getting the value out of the freaking thing either.
I mean, wouldn't it be great if we had a Make that was more bash-compatible? That had easy discoverability of rules (maybe with a --list option to just targets?), that was more cross-platform and that supported parallel execution... Oh and golly, it would be lovely to have conditional logic - and since we're not using the build graph, or generating known artefacts, maybe we can remove those things and leave it up to our other build tools like Cargo, docker or Go?
Well, as it turns out, Just has those things, and operates this way. It's essentially what we keep using Make for; instead of using Make for what Make was actually made for.