For the task of building there aren't many cross-platform abstractions which : - is easily boostrappable - works on OS without any kind of POSIX shell - allo

For the task of building there aren't many cross-platform abstractions which : - is easily boostrappable - works on OS without any kind of POSIX shell - allow to extract, download, create file / directories in a cross-platform way (cmake extracts 7z, zip, .tar.gz and friends on every platform with a single command) - allow to quickly parse and generate code with regexps without having to fight with whatever difference between versions of perl, rename, etc. there are on the host system - does not require "quoting" every flag or source file (seriously, this is just a pain in most more recent BS) - just works with everything that can be thrown at it and accommodates the project's way of handling dependencies instead of trying to impose its own - easily allows to find dependencies on systems with no canonical path to look for them