ninja

I've recently been playing with ninja, which does a good job of not being 'just another make' http://martine.github.io/ninja/. To quote their website, "Where other build systems are high-level languages Ninja aims to be an assembler.". It's used as a backend for GYP (Google Chromium) and is supported by CMake as well. I've had good success generating the files manually using something like ninja_syntax.py: https://github.com/martine/ninja/blob/master/misc/ninja_synt.... I also note that google are working on a successor to GYP, GN which targets Ninja http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/gn.

Ironically, the C++ code he's attempting to match itself uses a higher-level language[1] to generate a soup of tables and gotos[2]. But I think that observation supports the point he'd likely make: Haskell allows both the higher-level expressions of problems that produce optimization opportunities while preserving the option of dropping down to low-level trickiness if that's what you really need. [1] https://github.com/martine/ninja/blob/master/src/lexer.in.cc... [2] https://github.com/martine/ninja/blob/master/src/lexer.cc#L1...