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If zig.build can alleviate the pain of building C/C++ projects, then it will surely to replace C in the future. So, IMHO, it's more important to get zig.build right than zig itself

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Aren't C projects relatively easy to build? C++ is a little more complicated, so there is more of a push for header only libraries there. I see the problem is probably with external libraries, but that is largely not a huge problem on Linux/Unix. Windows was more of a pain but msys/mingw alleviated most of it.

not really, unless you're only building for one platform. gnu make isn't portable and doesn't have any real dependency management, so meta build systems quickly become a necessity. cmake is the most portable and the only real option on windows, but it's common to see projects that maintain support for both cmake and autotools.

and that's ignoring the nightmare of cross-compiling with gcc.

andrew kelley has talked about this[1]. his main point was about the number of dependencies you end up with compared to zig, where the standard library includes a high-level build system api. so your zig build scripts are written in ziglang and run by the zig compiler. no extra dependencies.

[1] https://youtu.be/Gv2I7qTux7g?t=2120

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