Great resources, thank you! I think I came across some of these ideas before and it might have been as simple as me resenting the syntax. I'll touch up on my `make` knowledge and try to make Piper more ergonomic!

Please don't do that! Good reasons to borrow ideas from make would be familiarity for those coming from make, but definitely not because make is ergonomic. The entire reason you must put in tons of mental effort to grok this one true method of make usage I linked above is specifically because of how non-ergonomic make is out of the box.

My comment was meant to be practical advice considering make's popularity. A while back I wanted to replace a legacy script that generated Makefiles for a project at work, and I started out by making something very similar to Piper in python so it was easy for coworkers, etc, but ended up finding the guide I mentioned in my above comment while doing gcc dependency generation. Since I was targeting make underneath anyways, and my needs were less complex than I thought, I ended up scrapping my redundant python build tool.

Oops I worded it badly! I meant take some theory from Make and modify it to be more ergonomic before adding it into Piper. A la rethinking it all with new knowledge I gain.

If you haven't already, I'd seriously suggest having a look at redo (the theory but also apenwarr's implementation at https://github.com/apenwarr/redo).

It's not going in the same direction you are exactly but building a mental model of it in my head was salutary in terms of thinking through the purpose and implementation of build tools and hopefully it'll be similarly useful to you.

An idea:

If piper is clearer for you, it can "compile" down into make, and then let gmake do the heavy lift, at least for some of the early prototyping.

Better to target Ninja, no? Since it’s basically designed for that.

Could be, I haven't used it.

There are so many build systems that honestly... it is crazy to me.

(grabbing geezer stick) When I grew up we only had make... and we liked it! /s

Implicit rules and pattern rules have the little issue with header dependencies that I can never get over with. It always feels like I can only choose simplicity or accuracy in incremental builds. I suppose -MMD is the way for C, though the way it pulls in system header checks always feels a bit too far.