Fastmake

Fastmake is a program that is used mainly by software developers to maintain software build process.
Fastmake is one of the make programs family. The most similar make program is GNU make. Fastmake differs from GNU make in that it contains additional features that extend Makefile syntax and increase program speed.
Fastmake was started in 2005 as a replacement for dmake build tool. That years the Makefile syntax was as in dmake. In 2008 Fastmake was published and became available for downloading. Since then Makefile syntax has been moving towards GNU make. This is because GNU make is widely used and therefore there is more chance for Fastmake to be useful.
The key starting point of Fastmake performance optimization is working within one operating system process.
When a classic make program needs to respawn itself it launches another operating system process while Fastmake calls a function which creates new context and works within the same process. This allows to maintain effective caches for entire build tree. Also Fastmake offers fast replacements for most popular shell tools like cp, echo and so on.
One of the tasks that takes place in software build process is determining dependencies. Fastmake has integrated dependency scanner for C/C++ source files.
Syntax improvements are aimed to solve some essential build automation tasks that are hard to be done via GNU make. Such tasks are combined or 'parallel' compilation, automatic dependencies tracking, omitting TAB character in Makefile that is hard in many editors and so on.
Fastmake is an open and free program that means that it is free of charge with source code available.
Fastmake is written in the programming language. GNU bison program is used to generate parser module.
Flex lexical analyser program is used to generate lexeme generator.

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