Another interesting paper is "Build Systems à la Carte" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/03/build-systems-5ab0f42d0f937.pdf https://ww

Another interesting paper is "Build Systems à la Carte" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/03/build-systems-5ab0f42d0f937.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0... which explains characteristics of some build systems "static vs dynamic dependencies; local vs cloud; deterministic vs non-deterministic build rules; support for early cutoff; self-tracking build systems; and the type of persistent build information. ... We show that we can instantiate our abstractions to describe the essence of a variety of different real-life build systems, including Make, Shake, Bazel, and Excel, each in a dozen lines of code or so"