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You get no (compatible) make on MSVC. More imporantly, whith nontrivial dependencies to third party libraries, self-coded makefiles just break down. Cross-platform handling of dependencies is fragile and makes drudgery. You're liable to do worse than CMake - after wasting a lot of time and energy.

CMake is more an alternative to GNU autoconf and pals, with the difference that it has first class support for things like MSVC and XCode.

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I don't build for windows so that's moot for me. Well I do but not C.

I've quite happily built makefiles that work on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and HP/UX that aren't fragile or laborious. It just takes appropriate knowledge of the platforms. I've built some stuff on OSX (small SDL project) and it wasn't too obtuse apart from some paths.

CMake, much as all of these things, works up to a point at which point it tries desperately to kill you at every available opportunity.

Is nmake not compatible with make? I thought that it was. I haven't programmed C/C++ on Windows at all though, so I have no experience with this.

Microsoft "nmake" is unrelated to the AT&T-originated Unix "nmake", which you may be thinking of.

(people rarely even attempt nontrivial Makefiles that are portable between BSD and GNU makes though...)

Not really- that, and it is incredibly feature poor.

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