I've recently been playing with ninja, which does a good job of not being 'just another make' http://martine.github.io/ninja/ http://martine.github.io/ninja/. T

I've recently been playing with ninja, which does a good job of not being 'just another make' http://martine.github.io/ninja/ http://martine.github.io/ninja/. To quote their website, "Where other build systems are high-level languages Ninja aims to be an assembler.". It's used as a backend for GYP (Google Chromium) and is supported by CMake as well. I've had good success generating the files manually using something like ninja_syntax.py: https://github.com/martine/ninja/blob/master/misc/ninja_syntax.py https://github.com/martine/ninja/blob/master/misc/ninja_synt.... I also note that google are working on a successor to GYP, GN which targets Ninja http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/gn http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/gn.