There is nothing as general purpose as make because make already fills that space well. OTOH, there are special purpose replacements that do a much better job i

There is nothing as general purpose as make because make already fills that space well. OTOH, there are special purpose replacements that do a much better job in their own domain. eg: I wouldn't want to maintain a large Java project with make. Gradle has a lot of helpful built-ins for managing the complexity of subprojects/dependencies and also runs on the JVM which makes debugging for Java-programmers a little more in-reach than make. All of that being said, I do use make for some fun personal projects. Automatic failure (a more-powerful "set -e" equivalent in common shells) and dependency tracking mean I can write really powerful automation scripts which can easily parallelize for slow steps.