> The language-specific build tools tend to be good, at least for mainstream languages introduced in the last 20 years. Certainly better than make. They are go

> The language-specific build tools tend to be good, at least for mainstream languages introduced in the last 20 years. Certainly better than make. They are good for 'quick & dirty' dev usage. And terrible for everything else. Specially integration. If they were perfect, you would not see things like lerna in JS (https://github.com/lerna/lerna https://github.com/lerna/lerna) or Conda in python (https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/ https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/) to go around them. > And arguably Nix isn’t even trying to be a build tool as much as a packaging tool (subtle but manifestly important difference), which is a damn shame. And they are right to be so. Build system and Package manager should be separated, or at least should be usable independently. If your environment is multi-languages or system oriented, there is no possible practical way you can get a tool that reliably do both and scale. It would imply to rewrite every the language specific builder of every language. I would say that in an ideal world, we would have language specific build system and one generic & portable set of dependency resolution tools (package managers). In our current world, every language is its own isolated island and making them interoperate is a mess.