Holyer and Pehlivan 2000 - Program uses no makefile. It records manually-issued compilation commands the first time round, then rebuilds programs using recorded command traces.

Pool 2003 - This paper describes a distributed compiler for C/C++ programs, and provides a good discussion of key issues related to parallel, distributed software builds.

Fowler 1985 - A new make tool with support for CPP, dependency generation, compiled makefiles, parallel execution, pathname parsing operators, and a powerful metalanguage for builtin rules.

Feldman 1979 - The original make paper, including makefile syntax, implicit rules, double colon targets, macros, VPATH macro, and the usual cleanup and install targets.

Baalbergen 1986 - Distributing machine specific compilation phases among machines with a distributed make program is about 3.5 times faster.

Lih and Zadok 1994 - Reports design issues and results of modifying GNU Make to do distributed makes using the Oakridge PVM Parallel Virtual Machine.

Kolpackov 2004 - This document compares recursive and non-recursive build systems (GNU make -j N) for building 277 software files in 15 directories using various combinations of parallelism and hardware. Non-recursive builds are faster.