I have recently started using Rake for my personal projects, mainly because I am not into make anymore and prefer to avoid learning a custom language just for builds.
However, based on a quick google, there don’t seem to be any many non-ruby projects using rake. And certainly none with any recall value.
Am I right? Are there any non ruby projects using Rake? And why is rake lagging behind?
EDIT: By lagging behind, why are there no major opensource project using Rake? What does Rake lack vs Cmake, for instance?
I run an open source project called Albacore: http://albacorebuild.net hosted on github: http://github.com/derickbailey/albacore
this project provides .NET developers with a suite of rake tasks for building their .NET systems. there are more than 5K downloads of albacore from rubygems.org.
i personally know of several multinational corporations that are using rake and albacore (one of them being a very large financial institute), along with several large scale enterprises, at least one of the leading agile project management products, and many of my friends and of course my own work in .net
i think there is a growing interest in using rake, at least in the .net community. i can’t speak for java or c/c++ or anything else, though.
i think rake will never be as big as we might want it to be, outside of the ruby community, though. this is in part because many people want to stick with the language that they work in already, so people in .net tend to use build tools that are written in .net, etc. but there will always be a contingent of developers that want to best tool for the job and will find languages and tools outside of what they use.