instead of writing yet another wrapper around yet another set of poorly standardised existing tools, I'm using aimake, a build system I wrote originally for NetHack 4
Not sure I'll be able to use aimake, as it's not invented here ;-)
On a more serious note, it sounds a bit strange to claim this isn't built on other tools -- he uses various compilers and linkers, and other utilities for installation etc. Eg CMake might not be perfect, but at least I couldn't find any kind of rationale for why cmake or tup might not work perfectly fine for the purpose? Maybe I skimmed too quickly?
I think he said that make solved only a small, relatively easy part of the problem, and he didn't want to have to work around the limitations of make and the syntax of makefiles. He also mentions that different make implementations have different idiosyncrasies that he'd have to work around. Also, I think he wanted to preserve more information about the dependency tree between the various steps, instead of having multiple tools each making their own half-assed (or completely manual) attempts at deducing that information.
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Not sure I'll be able to use aimake, as it's not invented here ;-)
On a more serious note, it sounds a bit strange to claim this isn't built on other tools -- he uses various compilers and linkers, and other utilities for installation etc. Eg CMake might not be perfect, but at least I couldn't find any kind of rationale for why cmake or tup might not work perfectly fine for the purpose? Maybe I skimmed too quickly?
The author wanted a build system which does not ultimately generate a bunch of Makefiles. CMake and GNU Autotools both rely on Make to do real work.
Cmake doesn't have to use make. It can for example use ninja.
Was there any reason for that beyond ideology?
I think he said that make solved only a small, relatively easy part of the problem, and he didn't want to have to work around the limitations of make and the syntax of makefiles. He also mentions that different make implementations have different idiosyncrasies that he'd have to work around. Also, I think he wanted to preserve more information about the dependency tree between the various steps, instead of having multiple tools each making their own half-assed (or completely manual) attempts at deducing that information.