Moving you to our "Build Systems and Source Control" forum.

I use CMake for work, but I've been using premake (https://premake.github.io/) for personal projects and have been slowly introducing it at work. Premake uses Lua as it's configuration language. I find it much easier to work with than CMake, especially when writing functions to do something complicated.

To answer your original question: when I was looking for alternatives to CMake, I tried bjam, but didn't find it very user friendly. I had used scons for a long time when working on Blender, so I knew that wasn't what I was looking for. I stumbled onto premake and it just worked out really well for me.

cheers,

Bob

I just use make and use cygwin to run it on Windows.

You have to add some extra handling to your makefile to use MSVC and have both sets of options for gcc & msvc but at least everything is right next to each other.

Windows 10 has a Linux sub-system that natively runs bash and the GNU tools and Canonical (Ubuntu) provides the tools for it. If I were setting something up new today, that is what I would use.

Everything else just has too many prerequisites for it to be convenient to use across several systems/OS's.

I used scons for a while in the naughts and just ended up going back to make.

The biggest problem today is the old versions of make included with actual/real Linux distributions.

(Make v4+ introduces some features that make writing powerful makefiles simpler.)