When comparing Rake vs GNU Make, the Slant community recommends GNU Make for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source build systems for C/C++?” GNU Make is ranked 3rd while Rake is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose GNU Make is:
Make takes advantage of the powerful UNIX shell, using it at it's full potential. STDIN and STDOUT are especially useful because of their versatility.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Powerful language
You can write code for your build system in Ruby. While not my choice for general programming, Ruby is powerful and expressive. Given some knowledge of Ruby, you can create powerful Rake extensions that result in your average target only needing a few lines in the rakefile in spite of having complex behaviors (Is the library for public consumption, or only for use within the current repo/tier? Compile certain files on certain platforms? Link to libraries published from other repos? etc.).
Pro Uses the full power of the UNIX shell
Make takes advantage of the powerful UNIX shell, using it at it's full potential. STDIN and STDOUT are especially useful because of their versatility.
Pro No need for wrapper modules
Other build tools need wrapper modules to do certain tasks. The biggest disadvantage of these wrapper modules is that they bind you to a version of that tool. With Make you don't have that problem, there's no need for wrappers and no tools to bind you to a version, you can use any version of Make that you want.
Pro Works with more than just node.js
Since it's written in C and can be found in all UNIX-based systems it can be used on platforms other than node.js.
Cons
Con Slooooow
For large codebases or with complex extensions, Rake can become quite slow. I'm aware of one codebase on which it can take 15 minutes to determine that no changes have been made and no recompilation is necessary.
Con Doesn't run on Windows by default
Make requires Cygwin/msys2/MinGW to run on Windows.