The title says "build systems", but the author is actually speaking about direct replacements for 'make'. Many of the points listed deal with limitations of the

The title says "build systems", but the author is actually speaking about direct replacements for 'make'. Many of the points listed deal with limitations of the compilers involved, and the inability of 'make' or its replacements to work around those limitations. It is, in my opinion, not useful to treat the compiler as something external to the "build system". For example, "It's possible to tell the compiler which file to write its output to." For a sufficiently advanced build system, of course this is possible. Just add a command-line option to the compiler that tells it to. What this article is actually saying is that writing a good build system is hard to impossible if you think that 'make' alone is the problem.