Promising alternatives to make? [closed]

I've been using make and makefiles for many many years, and although the concept is sound, the implementation has something to be desired.

Has anyone found any good alternatives to make that don't overcomplicate the problem?

check out SCons. For example Doom 3 and Blender make uses of it.

I have a lot of friends who swear by CMake for cross-platform development:

http://www.cmake.org/

It's the build system used for VTK (among other things), which is a C++ library with cross-platform Python, Tcl, and Java bindings. I think it's probably the least complicated thing you'll find with that many capabilities.

You could always try the standard autotools. Automake files are pretty easy to put together if you're only running on Unix and if you stick to C/C++. Integration is more complicated, and autotools is far from the simplest system ever.

doit is a python tool. It is based in the concepts of build-tools but more generic.

• you can define how a task/rule is up-to-date (not just checking timestamps, target files are not required)
• dependencies can be calculated dynamically by other tasks
• task's actions can be python functions or shell commands