Shake looks promising to me. It has a Haskell front-end, and clearly has had a lot of thought put into it. That said, I have never tried it. Despite CMake's at

Shake looks promising to me. It has a Haskell front-end, and clearly has had a lot of thought put into it. That said, I have never tried it. Despite CMake's attrocious syntax, the underlying compilation model has always worked more or less as I expected. I can't say that about most of the alternatives I have tried. I was frequently left confused and frustrated by my build systems until I found CMake.