Cake

The Unix utility make was written to automate the compilation and recompilation of C programs. For example, it has a builtin rule stating that an object file depends on the corresponding source file, and that to remake the object file from the source file, one must invoke the compiler on the source file. Then, when asked to make sure that a given set of object files are up-to-date, make recompiles exactly those object files that are out-of-date with respect to their source file. Make also allows programmers to state additional dependencies in a Makefile.

Despite its usefulness, make has several problems.

Make rules are not transitive. Given rules that state that file.o depends on file.c and that file.c depends on file.y, make cannot figure out that file.o depends on file.y.
Make cannot generate dependencies at run time. It would be very useful to be able to tell make that an object file depends not only on the corresponding source file but also on the header files referred to in the source file, but one cannot do that.
Make rules can only be based on suffixes. This prevents the integration of make with configuration management systems such as RCS (since make can't be told about RCS/file.c,v), and it makes it difficult to maintain object files for two or more systems in the same directory structure (e.g. one can't store them in sun/file.o and sgi/file.o).

These problems together significantly reduce make's effectiveness in many environments.

I designed cake as a replacement for make that avoids all the major problems described above, as well as several minor ones. Many people have therefore switched from make to cake and use it as an integral part of their software development environment, Since cake is so versatile, it can be used for other purposes as well. For example, some people have used it to maintain VLSI designs, while others use it to control the production of documents. Jon Claerbout, a professor of geology at Stanford, uses cake to control the active aspects of the interactive book he distributes on CD-ROM.

Cake is portable: it runs on machines from many vendors. It was distributed throughout the world via Internet news in 1987 and is now available from several anonymous ftp sites. Due to the nature of these distribution mechanisms, I do not know how many sites use cake. I do expect the number to be quite considerable: all professional programmers need a makelike tool, and even a very small percentage of the programmers on the Internet represents a very significant user base. The sites I do know about include Stanford University, University of Wisconsin, University of Illinois, Digital Equipment Corporation, Philips Corporation, NEC, Autodesk, Xerox PARC, CSIRO as well as several universities in Australia.