# Why SCons may be preferable to Make in many projects

DevFeed: [Why SCons may be preferable to Make in many projects](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/why-scons-is-cool-21924.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://blog.nelhage.com/2010/11/why-scons-is-cool/>)

Author: Nelson Elhage

Published: 2010-11-07T18:00:38Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Nelson Elhage](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/nelson-elhage.md>)

Topics: [make](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/make.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>)

Tags: [build](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/build.md>), [configuration](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/configuration.md>), [make](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/make.md>)

## AI overview

The article argues that SCons may be a better choice than Make in many projects, while noting exceptions involving legacy build systems or environments where installing SCons is unreasonable. Its central argument is that SCons provides explicit scoping, build environments, and global scheduling without recursive Makefiles.

## Source excerpt

I've recently started playing with scons a little for some small personal projects. It's not perfect, but I've rapidly come to the conclusion that it's a probably far better choice than make in many cases. The main exceptions would be cases where you need to integrate into legacy build systems, or if asking or expecting developers to have scons installed is unreasonable for some reason. The main reason that scons is cool to me, and the thing that makes it fundamentally different from make, is the introduction of actual scoping.