[gvalkov]

I'm a build engineer and SCons is one of the gems in my tool belt. Where it truly shines is as a framework for building build systems. At its core, it's just a library for building and executing a DAG. What most SCons users work with is the standard-library of rules built on top of the core API, that makes it immediately usable as a "high-level" build system like Meson or Cmake. In my experience, it's unparalleled when you have to model an entirely custom build-flow in a clean way. I've used it to model build-flows for custom tool-chains that would have been a nightmare to reason about if they were written in GNU Make and outright impossible with a meta-build system.

The only other tools I've found to rival this flexibility are Gradle (see the Software Domain Modeling chapter of its documentation) and Shake (though having to write rules in Haskell makes it a hard pill to swallow).