I think that avoiding complexity in the build system is the priority rather than avoiding a product that has cruft in it. Make can be simple, elegant and produc

I think that avoiding complexity in the build system is the priority rather than avoiding a product that has cruft in it. Make can be simple, elegant and productive even on large projects if you think before you do something. For example SCons, CMake suffer from the same number of problems that manifest themselves differently. This comes from many years of experience of watching people hang themselves with make, then hang themselves with the next best thing, then hang themselves with another thing, then say "all build systems are shit" and write their own which is inferior to make to start with. The problem is always the product, not the build tool. All the useful features of make can be learned in a couple of hours. For ref, I'm going to get shot about "cross platform builds" and stuff in reply to this comment. You're right. Use nmake on windows and make on *nix platforms.