I understand. In the past I used plain Makefiles too. GNU make is powerful. But it can get unpleasant and unreadably verbose pretty fast. For personal projects

I understand. In the past I used plain Makefiles too. GNU make is powerful. But it can get unpleasant and unreadably verbose pretty fast. For personal projects I use either meson, or if they are sufficienlty complex (targetting multiple architectures in a single project and other tricky things) and the environment is known/fixed, I genereate build.ninja file from a PHP based configure script and it's unbeatable as to the flexibility, predictability and build speeds. The best thing is that I can change anything and I can be sure that the incremental build will be the quickest and the result predictable. No more need for "make clean all" after changing some flags/variables in a Makefile. It's the benefit meson/ninja combo will give you too, but meson is replaced by an actual well known programming language like PHP in my case. For known environment builds, it's really nice. Much easier than fishing around the web for random recipies on how to do stuff in m4/meson/autoconf/automake/whatever custom language someone invented. I really love the intentional simplicity of ninja build. https://ninja-build.org/manual.html https://ninja-build.org/manual.html