When comparing Apache Ant vs GNU Make, the Slant community recommends GNU Make for most people. In the question“What are the best general purpose build systems?” GNU Make is ranked 1st while Apache Ant is ranked 12th. 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 Agile Dependency Manager (Ivy)
Ivy is a powerful tool for managing dependencies. It's highly configurable and very flexible and is not tied to any specific structure or architecture.
Although it can also be used as a standalone tool, it's tightly integrated with Ant and provides all the dependency management services for it, basically transferring all of Ivy's flexibility in dependency management to Ant as well.
Pro Good for special projects
Ant is an imperative build system, this means that it's very good at controlling the build process. You "tell" Ant what to do during the whole process, for example: "compile these files and put them in that folder". This is great for special projects where you want as much control as possible during the build process.
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 Too much freedom
While it's true that Ant gives you a lot of freedom and control over your builds, it also means that you will have to constantly reinvent the wheel on how your project structure and how everything fits together for every new project. This also makes it harder for other people to simply start working on your project because of the wide range of different ways to build a project with Ant. While tools that have more constraints generally end up looking the same and it's easier to understand how everything fits.
Con Doesn't run on Windows by default
Make requires Cygwin/msys2/MinGW to run on Windows.
