[millstone]

I think it is simply that make is too crufty to extend. It has perma-broken behavior around space handling, which nobody dares touch [1]. But you can't replace it because it is entrenched, so Makefiles must be wrapped, by configure or CMake or whatever. And these in turn have their own cruft, so must be wrapped, by autoconf and...well someone please wrap CMake!

The C and C++ ecosystem is crying out for a new build system, but there is no mechanism to converge on one. It's bad.

1: http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?712

[jnxx]

Make does what it does surprisingly well: It runs commands on files based on a description of dependencies. There is no shortage of would-be successors of make, but so far none of them has succeeded, which supports the hypothesis that "make" has hit a sweet spot.

There is one alternative to make which I think is worth mentioning, because of its simplicity, brilliance, and excellent support for correctness: it is redo, as in Apenwarrs redo:

https://redo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

And redo works with autotools!