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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

What’s the competition these days? I've never seriously used anything beyond plain old Make for my C/C++ projects, but that's more because they were dead simple and didn't justify the big-project features. What would someone use to build more complex things?

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Meson and Bazel are the primary contenders in CMake’s market, as far as I can tell.

In the realms of Windows and game development you primarily use Visual Studio Solutions / projects with property sheets. The underlying build system is msbuild.

It is less powerful than CMake and has a relatively steep learning curve due to poor documentation. But once you get the hang of it, it's actually pretty straight forward with just a few pitfalls here and there. You simply have to accept that certain things are not possible... but chances are, these things can't even be done easily in CMake either.

FASTBuild[0] is super fast for large projects and comes with distributed builds and caching out of the box. It requires a bit of effort to set up, but it supports globbing sources, there's no separate generate build step, and it can also make Visual Studio solutions.

[0]: https://www.fastbuild.org/docs/home.html

I like xmake, it's fast and it's a lua file, so no DSL

https://xmake.io/

Either CMake or Meson. If you never felt the need to move beyond Makefiles, Bazel is almost certainly too complex.

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