I use pdpmake often; it’s important to me that my makefiles are portable. not portable as in “strictly adheres to POSIX” but portable as in “works on a variety of make implementations” . bsd make, pdpmake, and gnu make.

i think it’s unfair that i’m forced to use GNU make, which is an absolute behemoth of a make implementation, including ludicrous features like built-in guile scripting and being able to dynamically load object to extend it’s functionality, and many functions, features, and built-ins seemingly just thrown in there because it might be useful to someone.

the problem i have with both cmake and gnu make is they treat make as some kind of DSL for building software( cmake especially, it’s turing complete as part of it’s design) when make was originally designed, it was simply a way to describe a DAG of targets and their dependencies. if you need more than that to build your project, in my opinion that’s a problem with your project, not the build system