For simple things, make is fine. It does file caching and the GNU tool does parallel concurrency. For anything needing light-to-moderate software configuration

For simple things, make is fine. It does file caching and the GNU tool does parallel concurrency. For anything needing light-to-moderate software configuration management, cmake is readily available and simple. If you're running a Google then you're using a build and DVCS that make use of extensive caching, synthetic filesystems, and tools that wrap other tools. I won't say what not to use. ;)