I used Makefile in university and that was simple enough until you needed to do something more complicated and then it started to become unwieldly fast. Back th

I used Makefile in university and that was simple enough until you needed to do something more complicated and then it started to become unwieldly fast. Back then, GNU was popular and automake/autoconf were attached to every project. If you were building on a Linux system, it worked, but being a Mac user, it always came with gotchas. It was quite a pain to use honestly and required a very deep understanding of it's .m4 design if you wanted to do anything clever. Cmake seemed to work well, meaning, I could just open the GitHub project and generate an Xcode project file and bam, it just worked. However, agreeing with everyone here, holy hell, trying to start a new project with it, or migrate another project over to it is quite a futile experience. It has several escape hatches in the weirdest places. Need to pass a conditional compiler flag? Good luck with that exercise. A compiler flag was added from a previous macro and there doesn't seem to be a way to keep it from doing that. I don't know, the whole system seems nice when you don't have to touch the make file, it just works, but I can only imagine the hair splitting effort it took to get that make file in a workable state.