GNU Make 4.3 Released
January 19, the development team of GNU Make, a build automation tool, announced the latest release of GNU Make 4.3. It’s been three and a half years since the previous release. There are numerous feature enhancements added in the release.
GNU Make is a management tool used for software build. It is not limited to source files of the programming language but rather manages overall process like handling a file to generate some product.
GNU Make 4.3 is the latest release, following 4,2, released in May 2016. One of the new features is the feature to declare a rule to generate multiple targets with a single invocation. Pattern rules had always had the feature to generate multiple targets with a single invocation, but now it can declare explicit rules.
It supports .EXTRA_PREREQS special variable. Words in the variable are treated as prerequisite of targets, but does not affect automatic variable expansion.
With MAKEFLAGS variable, now “-j” option, which enables parallelism mode, can be specified. On any supported system, posix_spawn() is now available instead of fork/exec. Now it supports the interoperability of GNU libc and Musl libraries.
There are many more performance improvements and feature enhancements. Please note that some of the new feature enhancements do not offer backward-compatibility.