I'm starting a new greenfield personal project which is a great time to try something new. Are there any new Make alternatives that I should try for building a multi-language, monorepo project that also has a number of Linux system dependencies?<p>For some context the languages will definitely be Python and Julia, with possibly Rust, C/C++, and CUDA. I'll likely be using poetry or conda for managing Python and there are also a good number of system dependencies that will need to be installed on a Linux box.
Why have all the previous Make alternatives failed to get traction?<p>I mean, ant, gradle, maven, imake, there's probably others... all have had their moment as the "It Girl" of builds, and then seemed to wither away. What's up with that?
For Julia the reproducibility is rather straightforward. You just stick a Project.toml/Manifest.toml in there and you'll always get the same package versions. Keeping the non-Julia dependencies together will be the hard part though.
Why do you seek an alternative to Make? It does the job, brilliantly. I’m not a fan of the syntax, however, especially the need for tabs. Is that your main concern?