1 Overview

If you want to build Racket modules with automatic dependency tracking, just use raco make as described in raco: Racket Command-Line Tools.

If you are already familiar with make, skip to the precise details of the make library in Make from Dependencies. This section contains a brief overview of make for everyone else.

When you use make, the idea is that you explain how to generate files in a project from a collection of source files that go through several stages of processing.

For example, say that you are writing a project that has three input files (which you create and maintain) called "a.input", "b.input", and "c.input". Further, there are two stages of processing: first you run a particular tool make-output that takes an input file and produces an output file, and then you combine the input files into a single file using combine-files. Using make, you might describe this as:

Once you’ve put this description in a file called "Makefile" you can issue the command:

  make total

to build your entire project. The "Makefile" consists of several rules that tell make how to create each piece of your project. For example, the rule that is specified in the first two lines say that "a.output" depends on "a.input" and the command for making "a.output" from "a.input" is

  make-output a.input a.output

The main feature of make is that it uses the time stamps of files to determine when a certain step is necessary. The make utility uses existing programs to build your project — each rule has a shell command line.

The make library provides similar functionality, except that the description is in Racket, and the steps that are needed to build target files are implemented as Racket functions.

Here’s a Racket program that is equivalent to the above:

(require make)

(define (make-output in out)

....)

(define (combine-files . args)

....)

(make

(("a.output" ("a.input") (make-output "a.input" "a.output"))

("b.output" ("b.input") (make-output "b.input" "b.output"))

("c.output" ("c.input") (make-output "c.input" "c.output"))

("total" ("a.output" "b.output" "c.output")

(combine-files "a.output" "b.output" "c.output"))))

If you were to fill in the ellipses above with calls to system, you’d have the exact same functionality as the original "Makefile". In addition, you can use make/proc to abstract over the various lines. For example, the "a.output", "b.output", and "c.output" lines are very similar so you can write the code that generates those lines:

(require make)

(define (make-output in out)

....)

(define (combine-files . args)

....)

(define files '("a" "b" "c"))

(define inputs  (map (lambda (f) (string-append f ".input")) files))

(define outputs (map (lambda (f) (string-append f ".output")) files))

(define (line file)

(let ([i (string-append file ".input")]

[o (string-append file ".output")])

`(,o (,i))

(list o (list i) (lambda () (make-output o i)))))

(make/proc

`(,@(map (lambda (i o) `(o (,i) ,(lambda () (make-output i o))))

inputs outputs)

("total" ,outputs ,(lambda () (apply combine-files outputs)))))