Advertisement time (not affiliated, just want to share the joy) : I personally use Xmake and try to advertise it every time I get the chance : FOSS, no DSL it's just Lua, dead simple yet featureful, and it is ninja fast, or at least claims to be I never bothered to check that out, it's fast enough for me.

https://xmake.io/#/

Absolutely! Basically every company I've worked with over the last couple years as a contractor followed this methodology and it's grown to be my default runner as it's language agnostic.

> incremental builds

I've found that to not matter that much these days - unless your projects is hundreds of thousands (or maybe millions even) of LOC, full builds are instant on modern machines.

That's definitely not true for:

- Most C++ or Rust projects

- Medium size or larger C projects

- Anything which is built with tools written in JavaScript (due to Node startup time overhead)

Stuff where a full build is close enough to instant:

- Most Java, C#, Go projects

- Small C projects

- Tiny/trivial C++ or Rust programs, or C++ programs written for embedded systems

This is just my experience. YMMV.

any sizeable rust or c++ project is gonna take a while to compile in my experience? I tend to break things off into libraries that are faster to compile. Some of my coworkers don't like it but they learn to deal (c++)

> I tend to break things off into libraries that are faster to compile.

Yes, exactly. Incremental compilation! This is what Make is not good at.

Unless your modern machine isn’t very powerful because you value food and rent more.

With python or bash. Certainly not with c++