I'm not sure how it differs from all the existing tools really, it looks like it does more or less the same stuff, just slightly differently. Also it does look like it requires that xmake is itself installed on the target system.
Personally i'd like something similar to autotools, only much saner, in that you write some sort of script (or definition file or whatever) that describes your project and its requirements and then the tool generates a configure shell script for unix and windows (i mean two configure scripts, one for unix and one for windows) that itself generates a makefile and/or project file.
So, like autotools, the recipient of the code will not need to have your magic build tool installed, just the common tools available on their system (shell, make, cc for unix/mingw, visual studio or whatever on windows). This can be very useful especially for libraries (it is annoying when every library wants its own special snowflake build tool).
This still requires xmake to be installed. CMake does that too, as does Premake and a bunch of other tools, but they all need to be installed - except Autotools.
What i'm talking about is generating a script for something that is part of the OS itself (like shell script, which is what Autotools does) that itself generates the Makefile which uses a widely available standard tool (Make). So a user (i include library users - as opposed to library developers - as "users" here) wont need to install xmake/cmake/whatever just to build the program/library, they only need to have shell and make which are available everywhere. On Unix at least, on Windows it'd need to generate a batch file for MSVC (this is where Autotools fall short since they're made for unix only).
Personally i'd like something similar to autotools, only much saner, in that you write some sort of script (or definition file or whatever) that describes your project and its requirements and then the tool generates a configure shell script for unix and windows (i mean two configure scripts, one for unix and one for windows) that itself generates a makefile and/or project file.
So, like autotools, the recipient of the code will not need to have your magic build tool installed, just the common tools available on their system (shell, make, cc for unix/mingw, visual studio or whatever on windows). This can be very useful especially for libraries (it is annoying when every library wants its own special snowflake build tool).