In a plugin I wrote I created a function with the following form / function:
$ cat makefile
ASDF := something
$(timeit 100, ${ASDF})
$ make
makefile:2 Time taken: mean: 232, stdev: 81.719765
make: *** No targets. Stop.
... where "timeit" is implemented using the online mean/variance estimate from Knuth's TAoCP. It evaluates the 2nd argument a number of times equal to what the 1st argument evaluates to then spits out a mean / std deviation across those runs.
I want to contribute this function back to the make project, however there's a problem if it gets accepted: calculating the standard deviation requires calling sqrt from math.h / libmath.
Am I safe to assume that adding a dependence on math.h / libmath isn't an option?