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makeGNU make provides many advanced capabilities, including many
useful functions. However, it does not contain a complete programming
language and so it has limitations. Sometimes these limitations can be
overcome through use of the shell function to invoke a separate
program, although this can be inefficient.
In cases where the built-in capabilities of GNU make are
insufficient to your requirements there are two options for extending
make. On systems where it’s provided, you can utilize GNU
Guile as an embedded scripting language (see GNU
Guile Integration). On systems which support dynamically loadable
objects, you can write your own extension in any language (which can
be compiled into such an object) and load it to provide extended
capabilities (see The load Directive).