Why?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18789162

Cool. One more "new" build system...

Yes, I know, we already have a lot of them. I decided to create this project because I couldn’t find a build tool for Linux which is quick and easy to use, flexible, ready to use, with declarative configuration, without the need to learn one more special language and suitable for my needs. I know about lots of build systems and I have tried some of them. Eventually, I concluded that I had to try to make my own build tool. Actually I began this project in 2013 year but I had no time to develop it at that time. I would do it mostly for myself, but I would be glad if my tool was useful for others.

The main purpose of ZenMake is to be as simple to use as possible but remain flexible. It uses declarative configuration files and should provide good performance.

Below I describe what is wrong with some of existing popular build systems in my opinion. I considered only opensource cross-platform build systems that can build C/C++ projects on GNU/Linux. Remember it’s only my opinion and it doesn’t mean that other build systems are bad. And it’s not complete technical comparation.

CMake

It’s one of the most popular cross-platform build systems nowadays as I know. But I have never liked its internal language - for me it’s not very convenient. And CMake is too complicated. As far as I know, a lot of people think the same but they choose to use it because it’s popular and with good support for many platforms.

Make

It’s a very old but still relevant build system. However, it has too many disadvantages and it has been mostly replaced by more recent build systems in many projects. But it is used as a backend in some other build systems, for example, by CMake.

Waf

Waf is a great build system and has a lot of capabilities. I like it and have some experience with it but for me it’s a meta build system. You can build your projects only by Waf but it has a long learning curve and is not easy to use.

ninja

Well, I don’t know a lot about this system. I know that it is used as a backend in Meson and CMake. But “it is designed to have its input files generated by a higher-level build system” and “Ninja build files are not meant to be written by hand”. So this build system is not for direct using.

Meson

It’s really not a bad build system which uses ninja as a backend to build by default. I have tried to use it but didn’t like some of its features:

The opinion that ‘wildcard for target files is a bad thing’ also exists in CMake. For example, authors of Meson wrote that wildcards slow things down. I don’t agree with the position of developers of Meson and CMake that specifying target files with a wildcard is a bad thing. I agree that for big projects with a lot of files it can be slow in some cases. But for all others it should be fast enough. Why didn’t they make it as an option? I don’t know. An alternative with an external command in Meson doesn’t work very well, and authors of Meson should know about it. There is no such a problem with wildcards in Waf.

SCons

Waf was created as alternative to this build system because:

Thomas Nagy decided that SCons's fundamental issues (most notably the poor
scalability) were too complex ...

It was taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waf. So in some things it’s similar to Waf and, as well as for Waf, it has a long learning curve.

Premake/GENie

I haven’t tried to use it because I forgot about its existence. But it’s not a build system. It’s a generator for some other build systems and IDE which is another way to build projects. I don’t know whether it is useful but the project has status beta/alpha. I have checked some modules and it looks like something is working but something is not. And it looks like it’s quite complex inside. However, the description of the project looks good. Perhaps, I had to try to use it.

I found some info about problems with premake: https://medium.com/@julienjorge/an-overview-of-build-systems-mostly-for-c-projects-ac9931494444. And it doesn’t look good to me.

Bazel

Well, I don’t know a lot about this build system but I read some documentation and tried some examples. I guess it’s a normal choice for big projects or for projects done internally in companies but is definitely too big for small projects. And it has some other problems: https://medium.com/windmill-engineering/bazel-is-the-worst-build-system-except-for-all-the-others-b369396a9e26