Right, I'm being more semantic here. CMake is a build system with the concepts of targets, linking, compiling, languages, toolchains, etc. The fact that it gets

Right, I'm being more semantic here. CMake is a build system with the concepts of targets, linking, compiling, languages, toolchains, etc. The fact that it gets "rendered" into a `build.ninja`, `.vcxproj`, `.xcodebuild`, or `Makefile` is (largely) ambivalent (I call these "build tools" or "build executors"). Other instances would be `gn` or Meson. They're the build system; ninja is "just" the build tool they use to actually implement their semantics. Still others like build2, Boost.build, or the Bazel family are both: the build system and the build tool. One cannot use CMake to write arbitrary Makefiles using all the fancy features available through macro expansion, rule templates, etc. All you have are CMake's semantics that can then be executed by a tool that implements POSIX makefile execution behaviors. A (probably poor) analogy is a network resource. It can be provided over HTTP, Gopher, or whatever. The semantics of the resource are the same, but the transport mechanism is just how it interacts with the rest of the world.