[zyedidia]

I've been working on a tool called Knit (https://github.com/zyedidia/knit) that I think is similar to what you are looking for. Essentially, a Knitfile is a Lua program with Make's declarative rule syntax baked in. Or in other words, it is like Make (with some additional changes inspired by Plan9 mk), but where Make's custom scripting language is replaced with Lua (but it still keeps the declarative rules language). It's still in progress (I'm currently using it in some projects, and then will likely make some more changes based on my experiences), but I hope to release a stable version in the next few months. If you or others also have feedback, please let me know!