When comparing Fabricate 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 Fabricate is ranked 14th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Can run tasks in parallel
Pro Avoids any step doing nothing
Detects input/output file changes and if input files didn't change, doesn't run the command again.
Pro Easy to script
Fabricate uses Python as a scripting language. Being a fully usable language and an easy one at that, makes Fabricate rather easy to script.
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 Not maintained
Con Doesn't run on Windows by default
Make requires Cygwin/msys2/MinGW to run on Windows.