I think most people get the sentiment but to say that somehow it’s better inside Google sounds hilarious to me.. try building chromium or similar things and you

I think most people get the sentiment but to say that somehow it’s better inside Google sounds hilarious to me.. try building chromium or similar things and you are greeted with a huge set of one off “Google solutions” that almost nobody else uses. oh don’t forget to edit the args.gn file and GYP defines and set your sysroot via a python script if you need to cross compile, download depot_tools and put it in your path so you can run “fetch” commands among others then finally now you have a ninja file and you can run ninja.. ok so all of those solutions somehow are better than writing a cmake file? It’s like one of the biggest problems that seems to be a plague related to build systems is that there is a point somewhere around the level of a makefile that a very large number of programmers can understand but is hard to maintain so various companies build infrastructure on top of the makefile that is semi custom.. then another engineer comes along and builds abstraction on top of that. So you end up with this house of cards that depends upon python 3.8, etc etc then finally there is a makefile. I do wish all of these whacky build systems would be required to have some choke point where it prints to stdout “generated makefile at path = /……, continuing in 3 seconds… running make -f xxxxxx”