Cross-compilation and multi-target build systems are among the words that tend to frighten a lot of people, mostly because they evoke images of hugely complicated build scripts that require arcane incantations to perform the desired operation. In this chapter, we'll be looking at a simple Makefile-based build system, based on a build system that has seen use in commercial projects across a range of hardware targets.
The one thing that makes a build system pleasant to use is to be able to get everything set up for compilation with minimal fuss and have a central location from which we can control all relevant aspects of building the project, or parts of it, along with building and running tests.
For this reason, we have a single Makefile at the top of the project, which handles all of the basics, including the determining of which platform we run on. The only simplification we're making here is that we assume a Unix-like environment, with MSYS2 or Cygwin on Windows...
