You might have just had a bad makefile.

The "canonical" way to just build what was changed with make is to let the compiler generate header dependencies during the build and to include those (=> if you change only 1 header, just the affected translation units get rebuilt). Works like a charm (and never messes up incremental builds by not rebuilding on a header-only change).

If you did not have proper incremental builds before, I would blame the makefile specifically and not make itself.

Another way to mess up with make is to not allow anything in parallel, either by missing flags (-j) or by having a rule that does everything sequentially.

Ninja does have less overhead than make, but your build time should be dominated by how long compiler and linker take; such a big difference between the two indicates to me that your old make setup was broken in some way.

It definitely was but that’s the issue with make, it allows for that sloppyness to enter the build system much easier. Cmake gives some rigidity and reuse to shield the casual dev from mucking up the build definition. You can probably do same things with make and cmake, it’s like a C vs C++ argument. And what I say to that is usually just do what you prefer to use and maintain