Question

Imagine you’re free to choose a tool like GNU make for a new C++ project. What would you choose? Are any usable substitutes out there?

It shall have/be

• a command line interface
• “easy” to understand
• easy to set up for a default c++ project
• may support src/bin seperation as common for Java
• may not add too much dependencies to other software/libs
• platform independent (new)
• features:
  • build rules / templates like make but in an human readable way
  • recursively crawling directories and applying the rules if there is no other
    “Makefile”
  • configuration by exception

Note:

Nothing’s wrong with GNU make. I just don’t like its grammar, all the stuff that grows in the years and the silly recursive make problems. I’m using gmake for years now.

Answer 1

I use cmake, and I’m very glad I made the switch.

EDIT

Feature list as found in the wikipedia article:

• Configuration files are CMake scripts, which use a programming
  language specialized to software builds
• Automatic dependency analysis built-in for C, C++, Fortran and Java
• Support of SWIG, Qt, via the CMake scripting language
• Built-in support for many versions of Microsoft Visual Studio including versions 6, 7, 7.1, 8.0, and 9.0
• Generates build files for Eclipse CDT (C/C++ Development Tools)
• Detection of file content changes using traditional timestamps,
• Support for parallel builds
• Cross-compilation
• Global view of all dependencies, using CMake to output a graphviz diagram
• Support for cross-platform builds, and known to work on
  • Linux and other POSIX systems (including AIX, *BSD systems, HP-UX, IRIX/SGI, and Solaris)
  • Mac OS X
  • Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP, Windows Vista and MinGW/MSYS
• Integrated with DART (software), CDash, CTest and CPack, a collection of tools for software testing and release

But to be honest: Just about anything is better than the gnu toolchain.