Make works on a files in -> one file out basis, and the IDE has no visibility of any other side-effects. That works for build systems with that property, but s

Make works on a files in -> one file out basis, and the IDE has no visibility of any other side-effects. That works for build systems with that property, but some of the interesting bits of builds touch multiple files. It's also why I like Make and Maven and don't think Bash and Ant make suitable build tools. Maven and Gradle plugins also have the advantage that the IDE can be taught to understand what they do -- a Makefile can run a compiler, but the IDE can decide to use incremental compilation and update a debug target on-the-fly, as it can see what the project build is doing and replicate the results. On the subject of generating project files, pretty much everyone I know prefers to use the IDE's tooling for importing build files rather than the build tool's tooling for generating IDE files. And that's probably a self-reinforcing behaviour as far as tooling quality goes.