I started my career with C++ development and never used a direct makefile in any of my projects. When I write C/C++, I use CMake. My current job has me programming in Go where people seem to love makefiles, but I consistently find bugs in the implementation (usually has too many phony targets, etc.), Why don't people use makefile generators outside of the C/C++ community?
I don't use CMake for embedded systems because the syntax and options are even more obtuse for what I need to do with it. When I get down to it, every make-based build system I've ever used boils down to using the macro language to generate all the targets, and then building your output board image by dependencies. But it's the details of how to do this that vary widely depending on your application for the board.
CMake does a great job of compiling executable code and linking it using your compiler of choice, but where it falls flat is in giving me a convenient mechanism for fitting that executable into the system image.
I'd need to know more about the details to answer completely. I think CMake does have a complicated syntax, yet I think it is worth the nuisance in most cases. Many tools can use CMake's compilation database for configuration, such as clang-format and clang-tidy.
Can Yocto or CMake build QNX systems or bare-metal binaries with TI's compiler? The tool I'm looking for is Make because Make gives me a ton of flexibility to build whatever freaky combination of binaries might go into whatever product I'm working on, and then combine those binaries into a system image.
The point I'm trying to make is that every build system except Make solves a really specific class of build problem(building applications, or building Linux systems using GCC) and then pretentiously claims to support everything that matters. What you're actually getting is a small sliver of what you might need in my world.
This article is another example of how Make can do something really unexpected by providing really simple features and letting you decide what matters to you. I've yet to see another build system that is as generally useful.
