[zyedidia]

This will unfortunately be a pain point for any build system that isn't already entrenched in the ecosystem. I think Knit does as well as it can to mitigate this:

* There are fully static prebuilt binaries for a wide variety of platforms (including Windows, where I think it is actually more complicated to install Make than Knit).

* Knit can generate a shell script or Makefile for the build, so these can be used for users who don't want to do development but just want to build from source.

* It is easy to build Knit from source (thanks to Go). Yes you need a Go toolchain, but once you have that it is just `go install github.com/zyedidia/knit/cmd/knit@latest`. Of all the languages that could have been used, I think Go is one that makes the "build from source" experience very straightforward.