It's interesting that under the section "Handling cross-platform differences" the author calls 'uname -s'. It's not cross-platform if you ignore Windows (and requiring to install cygwin doesn't count), or cross-compiling scenarios. Also makefiles don't help all that much if you want to work in the platform's 'native' IDEs (like Visual Studio or Xcode). These 3 points (cross-platform, cross-compiling and IDE support) are exactly the points that meta-build-systems like cmake (or scons, or premake) fix. Remember that cmake isn't a replacement for make, for command line compilation it usually makes sense to let cmake generate makefiles (except on Windows).