There are really only three sane choices for C/C++ build systems right now, in my opinion: 1. Traditional Make files. Keep it simple, don't feel compelled to

There are really only three sane choices for C/C++ build systems right now, in my opinion: 1. Traditional Make files. Keep it simple, don't feel compelled to use all the dark corners of the language, and accept that it will be a little more verbose than some other solutions. And don't expect portability to Windows, since you won't get it (cygwin doesn't count as Windows). There are some portability problems between UNIX variants, but actually I think it's pretty easy to deal with these in plain old Make. 2. CMake. It makes the simple things simple and the hard things possible. It has its own simple scripting language which build files are written in, so you don't need to tear out your hair worrying about whether the the user's version of bash / python / perl / whatever matches yours. The language has the abstractions and functions that you need built-in, so most CMakeLists.txt tend to look the same (less wheel reinvention than you would get just using a general purpose language like Python or Perl for Makefiles.) CMake is built with backwards compatibility in mind, so you can easily use old projects with newer versions of CMake. This is something you just don't get with autotools, where you have to have the correct version (not newer, not older) of autotools installed to build the project. CMake does the detection of which header files are needed to rebuild which .c or .cc files which plain old Make doesn't do (without adding clunky extensions). CMake is also portable to Windows, which autotools is not. (again, limping along under cygwin doesn't count.) CMake can generate visual studio projects which can be used to directly build software. 3. Visual studio. If you only care about Windows, this is a sane choice.