1.2 Reasons not to use Mosmake

• The only make implementation it's known to work with is GNU make.

• You need a way to run Bourne shell scripts. In Windows this probably means you need to install Cygwin or some other Un*x emulation. See section 2.11 Mosmake on non-unix platforms.

• You need Perl to run the makefile-generating part of Mosmake.

• Mosmake assumes that your SML code forms a program that runs by itself and does its own I/O. If, instead, your project just provides a bunch of functions that the end user is supposed to interact with through the SML read-eval-print loop, Mosmake may not be the thing for you.

• Mosmake doesn't support VPATH builds. (VPATH is a make feature that lets you build a project with object code, binaries and other generated files being placed in a work directory hierarchy that parallels a separate read-only source tree). Implementing this would be a lot of work because Moscow ML has no good support for putting the object-code files anywhere but right next to the source.