i've been writing C++ half my life, C a couple years less, stopped using them daily 4 years ago, but i've shipped enough projects with them to be "experienced".

i've been writing C++ half my life, C a couple years less, stopped using them daily 4 years ago, but i've shipped enough projects with them to be "experienced". exactly one of those projects use CMake (an open source Qt app that's had a couple million downloads), and the infra for that was pretty finalized by the time i got there. if "comfortable with the basics" means "add a new .c file to the list of stuff to compile", sure, easy. if it includes "detecting the presence of some optional dependency and then conditionally compiling+linking a .so in response" then not at all. more importantly though, a large number of cmake directives i cannot guess their effects except by consulting the manual. there's a lot of build systems out there. and a lot of technologies tend to come in pairs: a Qt C++ program is likely to use CMake, a GTK C/C++ program is likely to use meson, an SDL C/C++ program is likely to use make. not that there's no variance, but it's weirdly easy to specialize more narrowly than you think.