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GNU Make VS Concourse

Compare GNU Make VS Concourse and see what are their differences

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GNU Make logo GNU Make

GNU Make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program's source files.

Concourse logo Concourse

Pipeline-based CI system written in Go
  • GNU Make Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-12
  • Concourse Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-07-31

GNU Make features and specs

  • Portability
    GNU Make is highly portable and can be used across various Unix-like operating systems as well as on Windows.
  • Dependency Management
    It efficiently handles complex dependencies between various parts of the software, ensuring that changes are propagated properly.
  • Open Source
    Being open-source software, GNU Make is freely available and can be modified according to user needs.
  • Wide Adoption
    It is widely adopted in the industry, which means that there is extensive documentation and a large community for support.
  • Efficiency
    GNU Make speeds up the build process by only recompiling the necessary parts of the codebase.

Possible disadvantages of GNU Make

  • Complex Syntax
    The syntax of GNU Makefiles can become very complex, especially for large projects, making them hard to read and maintain.
  • Limited Cross-Platform Scripting
    While the tool itself is cross-platform, Makefiles can sometimes include shell commands that are not portable.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    Beginners may find it challenging to grasp the concepts and syntax of GNU Make, leading to a steep learning curve.
  • Debugging Difficulty
    Debugging Makefiles can be difficult, with limited tools available to trace or step through the make process.
  • Performance Bottlenecks
    For extremely large projects, performance can become an issue, as the evaluation of dependencies might become slow.

Concourse features and specs

  • Simplicity and Consistency
    Concourse CI offers a simple and consistent UI/UX across different platforms. The interface is intuitive and designed to make it easy for users to visualize complex pipelines.
  • Containerized Builds
    Everything Concourse runs is within containers, ensuring isolated and reproducible builds. This method reduces the chances of environment-related issues during the deployment process.
  • Pipeline as Code
    Concourse utilizes a declarative approach to define pipelines using YAML files, which makes versioning and changing pipelines straightforward and trackable.
  • Scalability
    Concourse is highly scalable and can work well with very large pipelines and numerous concurrent builds, especially fitting for microservices architectures.
  • Dynamic Workflows
    It supports dynamic workflows through its resource/event-driven nature, allowing pipelines to react automatically to changes in resources.

Possible disadvantages of Concourse

  • Steeper Learning Curve
    New users might find Concourse's approach to pipeline as code and its unique abstractions more challenging to grasp initially compared to other CI/CD tools.
  • Limited Plugin Ecosystem
    Compared to other CI/CD platforms, Concourse has a more limited plugin ecosystem, which may require building custom resources for specific tasks that are readily available in other solutions.
  • Resource Intensity
    Due to its containerization strategy, Concourse can be resource-intensive, particularly if not appropriately managed or scaled.
  • Less Community Support
    Although active, the community around Concourse CI is smaller than those for more established CI/CD tools like Jenkins, which can result in fewer community-contributed plugins and resources.
  • Complex Configuration
    While powerful, the configuration files can become complex and hard to manage for large-scale deployments, requiring significant maintenance effort.

Analysis of GNU Make

Overall verdict

  • Yes, GNU Make is a robust and reliable tool for managing build processes. Its long-established reputation and widespread use in both open-source and commercial projects underline its effectiveness and flexibility.

Why this product is good

  • GNU Make is widely used because it automates the build process, efficiently handling dependencies and detecting minimal sets of changes in source files. It is highly customizable, supports non-recursive builds, and integrates well into various development environments.

Recommended for

  • Software developers working on C/C++ projects
  • Teams looking to automate build processes
  • Projects that require cross-platform build capabilities
  • Developers who prefer command-line tools
  • Open-source project maintainers

GNU Make videos

No GNU Make videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Concourse videos

Concourse Smart Wheels - Review

More videos:

  • Review - Australian Golf Digest TV - Concourse CBM3 Golf Buggy
  • Review - THE GOLF SHOW CONCOURSE CBM3

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to GNU Make and Concourse)
Front End Package Manager
Continuous Integration
0 0%
100% 100
JS Build Tools
100 100%
0% 0
DevOps Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Concourse seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 22 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

GNU Make mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of GNU Make yet. Tracking of GNU Make recommendations started around Mar 2021.

Concourse mentions (22)

  • Tracking Supermarket Prices with Playwright
    > My CI of choice is [Concourse](https://concourse-ci.org/) which describes itself as "a continuous thing-doer". While it has a bit of a learning curve, I appreciate its declarative model for the pipelines and how it versions every single input to ensure reproducible builds as much as it can. What's the thought process behind using a CI server - which I thought is mainly for builds - for what essentially is a data... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • We built the fastest CI in the world. It failed
    > Imagine you live in a world where no part of the build has to repeat unless the changes actually impacted it. A world in which all builds happened with automatic parallelism. A world in which you could reproduce very reliably any part of the build on your laptop. That sounds similar to https://concourse-ci.org/ I quite like it, but it never seemed to gain traction outside of Cloud Foundry. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • Ask HN: What do you use to run background jobs?
    I used Concourse[0] for a while. No real complaints, the visibility is nice but the functionality isn't anything new. [0] https://concourse-ci.org/. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • How to host React/Next "Cheaply" with a global audience? (NGO needs help)
    We run https://concourse-ci.org/ on our own hardware at our office. (as a side note, running your own hardware, you realise just how abysmally slow most cloud servers are.). Source: over 2 years ago
  • Cicada - Build CI pipelines using TypeScript
    We use https://concourse-ci.org/ at the moment and have been reasonably happy with it, however it only has support for linux containers at the moment, no windows containers. (MacOS doesn't have a containers primitive yet unfortunately). Source: over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing GNU Make and Concourse, you can also consider the following products

CMake - CMake is an open-source, cross-platform family of tools designed to build, test and package software.

Jenkins - Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration server with 300+ plugins to support all kinds of software development

SCons - SCons is an Open Source software construction toolโ€”that is, a next-generation build tool.

Drone.io - Continuous Integration For GitHub and Bitbucket That Monitors Your code For Bugs

SBT - SBT is a build tool for Scala, like Ant or Maven but with hieroglyphics.

Travis CI - Simple, flexible, trustworthy CI/CD tools. Join hundreds of thousands who define tests and deployments in minutes, then scale up simply with parallel or multi-environment builds using Travis CIโ€™s precision syntaxโ€”all with the developer in mind.