> Rake, the Ruby version of Make

That's a common misconception, but people often don't understand what make is. Contrary to the intuition, make is _not_ a build system (like, say, cmake), although build systems can be (and often are) implemented on top of make; nor is it a task runner (like rake).

At its core, make is a declarative expert system (with a very sane design and a very quirky rule syntax). Its area of expertise is updating files. I urge every user of make who hasn't read "Recursive Make Considered Harmful"[1] to do so.

[1]: http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf

Yup, and a common modern use case of make is to call in to other language specific build systems.

There is something extremely weird about the idea of having a build system for a particular language. It is not uncommon for a project to have multiple languages and it is also possible that some of the source code in one language is generated by an executable in another language. Because of this and because of compatibility issues the correct number of build systems to exist is 1. If there is more than 1 in a single project it will be the case that sometimes more is rebuilt than necessary.

Yes I wouldn't ever want more than one build system. I use Rake to build Crystal, and haven't even bothered to investigate Crystal's offering.

Rake isn't for Ruby any more than Make is for C. It comes from that ecosystem, but you can use it for anything. If you've got a system ruby installed, you've probably also got rake.

Exactly. Remember in 2010 before grunt a lot of us were using maven to build single page JavaScript apps? That was pretty funny in retrospect :-) The creator of angular created the precursor to the karma test runner, called jstestdriver, which was a maven plugin ;-) It worked though! We built a single page app with tdd using it at Autodesk.