not really, unless you're only building for one platform. gnu make isn't portable and doesn't have any real dependency management, so meta build systems quickly

not really, unless you're only building for one platform. gnu make isn't portable and doesn't have any real dependency management, so meta build systems quickly become a necessity. cmake is the most portable and the only real option on windows, but it's common to see projects that maintain support for both cmake and autotools. and that's ignoring the nightmare of cross-compiling with gcc. andrew kelley has talked about this[1]. his main point was about the number of dependencies you end up with compared to zig, where the standard library includes a high-level build system api. so your zig build scripts are written in ziglang and run by the zig compiler. no extra dependencies. [1] https://youtu.be/Gv2I7qTux7g?t=2120 https://youtu.be/Gv2I7qTux7g?t=2120