Having spent moderate to significant time with bjam, waf, qmake, make and cmake, I more or less settled on cmake because: A. It's what everyone else is using.

Having spent moderate to significant time with bjam, waf, qmake, make and cmake, I more or less settled on cmake because: A. It's what everyone else is using. B. It's simple to do common things. C. It's pretty darn fast with the Ninja backend. The only downside seems to be that the cmake language is ugly and limited. Fortunately, I only need to write a tiny amount of cmake code to build most of my projects, since find_package is so good. (Though, it probably sucks to be the guys making that work.) To be honest, every tool I've tried has kind of sucked. cmake just sucks the least. One day I'd like to investigate tup and shake, though.