In my experience the short answer is that there are no declarative build tools for C or C++. The longer answer is that there are no declarative build tools bec

In my experience the short answer is that there are no declarative build tools for C or C++. The longer answer is that there are no declarative build tools because all the build tools aim to support all the insane build requirements of existing C or C++ projects. At that point embedding a turing complete scripting language actually makes for simpler build descriptions than some massive declarative system trying to handle all the corner cases. Of course, that raises the question: why don't any C or C++ build tools limit themselves to some sane subset of build requirements? That, I don't have a good answer for.