Instead of a DSL backed by some external tool, it's possible to write build scripts in a normal programming language. You only really need to implement "spawn p

Instead of a DSL backed by some external tool, it's possible to write build scripts in a normal programming language. You only really need to implement "spawn process and give it these arguments" and "this depends on that" to reproduce most of C++ build scripts. I've gone with lua and libuv because the concurrency model is so trivial. Each process spawn goes in a coroutine, stderr and stdout go into lua strings, use yield when the process is still running. However that comes with pretty minimal linting or error detection on the input, so maybe use some other language if you want that. Or rephrasing, instead of a DSL for describing a graph and transforms to apply to the nodes, you can use a library in your favourite language instead. You might like that more than debugging cmake.