Well, not difficult... I'm not sure about that. Most hand-tailored Makefiles have seen aside from well known OSS projects (Linux Kernel, suckless stuff) genera

Well, not difficult... I'm not sure about that. Most hand-tailored Makefiles have seen aside from well known OSS projects (Linux Kernel, suckless stuff) generally had major issues. Here is a sample of what I've seen: * not supporting common variables, specially DESTDIR in install target, but also PREFIX, BINDIR, etc, or CC and CFLAGS for compilation. (https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Directory-Variables.html#Directory-Variables https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Directory-Varia...) * bad ordering, at least preventing parallel build (-j N) * bad error handling which result in silent failures, I've seen it in Makefiles using for/while loops, if/then/else, or successions of commands (cmd1;cmd2) inside targets for example. Makefiles are also a little too crude for somewhat complex projects. Doing things like searching header pathes, detecting which OS you're on, what is the CPU endianness, searching the required dependencies and recovering information such as version about said dependencies would be extremely painful to do with only plain Makefile. CMake contains a lot of ready to use modules to tackle the most common issues, and you can easily write your own modules if you need to. Aside from very simple project, I would not recommend using plain Makefiles, there are just to easy to do wrong.