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But real programmers should use them. If they want to automate this process they should write their own utilities.

Why? There are perfectly good, well-developed tools available so why not use them?

A cabinet-maker doesn't have to forge his own saws and chisels.

Why? There are perfectly good Operating Systems, Why create your own and not use them.
My Advise: Do not depend upon tools made by others, be self-sufficient as long as you can.

If you want to write your own built system; by all means, go ahead, but if you want to write your own operating system, don't feel compelled to write a build system as well. Even Microsoft used/uses a variation of "make" (nmake) to build their OS.

Also, you're not Microsoft (or Apple or Sun/Oracle or IBM, etc.). You don't have a team of hundreds/thousands working on your OS. It's completely impractical (if not impossible) to build absolutely everything from scratch in a "one-man" project. Choose carefully what you want to build yourself and what you want to "import" from elsewhere.

So I should write my own microcode? In fact, I guess, I'd better build my own processor, which is going to involve mining my own silicon.

You have to draw a sensible limit somewhere. Me, I'm interested in operating systems. I'm not really interested in reinventing vim, make, etc. (perhaps for the final OS, but not for the development host).

Also, if you are using your own tools, you have to compile your tools to let the others use it (I don't think you should be distributing the binaries). So..., what are you gonna compile your tools with (I mean unless you don't plan on letting anyone else compile your OS)

If NIH is a disease then it is not a bad disease.

It is one that can cost you a job.

make++

If you actually manage to implement a buildsystem that is usable and suits my needs written in Assembler; then congrats, you wasted an immense amount of time and its not even architecture independent, possibly not even system independent.

I spent a quite good amount of time with implementing Capri and its written in C++ (for many good reasons).

You should maybe understand that we dont want to do you bad when telling you to write in C.

I'm not that asm guy, I'm the 32 bit Firmware, make++ guy...

I mean the OP