I think for C compilation, Tup is probably better than make. It also has a couple of small syntax improvements compared to make. In particular, it's much better

I think for C compilation, Tup is probably better than make. It also has a couple of small syntax improvements compared to make. In particular, it's much better with commands that loop over targets and dependencies. However, as someone who doesn't write much C, I went back to make. Makefiles seem to adapt really well to different workflows. A lot of my makefiles look like "download this publically available data, scp this secret data off a company server, mungle all the data with some scripts, shallow clone this branch of that repository, run the program in the repository a few times under different conditions, make a chart of the results". Tup really doesn't like steps like "clone this repository". Make isn't exactly great with keeping track of targets that output entire directories, but it does work. I also feel like, for me, make has become more powerful over time as I've learned other tools. Specifically: being able to just magic up any old environment using Nix and be confident that it won't break, mashing data with things like jq, cut, sed and awk, and quick database operations with SQLite.