As build systems go, this seems like a promising experiment: http://sourceforge.net/p/meson/wiki/Design%20rationale/ http://sourceforge.net/p/meson/wiki/Design%

As build systems go, this seems like a promising experiment: http://sourceforge.net/p/meson/wiki/Design%20rationale/ http://sourceforge.net/p/meson/wiki/Design%20rationale/ tl/dr: -DSL for builds with well defined semantics, leverages existing toolchain -design constraints for the system that make sense, i.e. speed, portability, usability and common sense -does not try to reinvent the wheel but rather simplify the usage of existing tools - the build config it generates on my Ubuntu box seems to really deliver on the speed promise - I have no benchmarks to quote but a small c++ codebase using all sorts of dependencies including boost compiled nearly instantly