Makefiles
Simply put Makefiles are used to help decide which parts of a large program need to be recompiled. Makefiles are most commonly used with big C/C++ programs as other programming languages have their own build tools that are very similar to Makefiles (Java has Gradle or Maven). Makefiles don't necessarily need to be used for compiling programs as they just define a series of instructions to run depending on what files have changed. The focus of this page will however be on how Makefiles are used to compile C/C++ programs.