[einpoklum]

CMake may "just work" without you investing much/any effort - in the future.

For now, the situation is that if you invest in your CMake - blood sweat and tears - then the build itself will "just work" on many/most/all platforms. Which is already pretty good - compared to being stuck with Makefiles.

Also, CMake is essentially its own debugger, because almost all state is just a bunch of string variables.