[harry8]

Cake https://github.com/dcasnowdon/Cake

Written by Matt Hermann who I believe is now at google - I've never met him. I worked somewhere that used it and have used it ever since for every greenfields C++ project I've done and just don't think about my build system anymore. For me this just works for everything I need, adding a linkflag for this .cpp file only? Dead simple, hard to imagine it being simpler. Build tests and run with valgrind equally so. I have a single top level makefile that literally just specifies targets, eg release, test, asan_test, clang_release etc. Each is a single cake line.

I highly recommend it for C++ on linux (haven't used it elsewhere to say), for me it's a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Not dealing with autotools or scons or complicated make based build systems makes C++ so much nicer to work with.