Are there any libraries or frameworks out there that are designed to facilitate the building of projects from within another full fledged programming language?
It is very easy to specify logic, sets, and complicated rules in programming languages like C++, java, etc, but it seems like an uphill battle to do these things in a Makefile. I haven’t dug into Ant or Maven or any of the other building tools yet, but if I could just write all my build logic into a C++ program it would be much easier! (Assuming I had some helpful tools.)
Maybe you’d like to look at this project: http://www.scons.org/
But, what would you like to do besides specifying modules dependencies and build rules? I think putting too much logic into the build system is just creating another extra problem; try to stick to well known configuration tools and you’ll have one thing less to worry about.
About Maven and Ant, they are a little bit java-centric, but can be used for any kind of projects and have loads of plugins to perform almost any task you could imagine. If you prefer to use a more unix-oriented environment, but want a higher level layer on top
makeyou can use the Autotools.