Build tools (was: What Makes A Programming Language Good)

[Lutger Blijdestijn]

Russel Winder wrote:

> On Thu, 2011-01-20 at 12:32 +0100, Gour wrote:
>> On Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:13:00 +0000
>> Russel Winder <russel at russel.org.uk> wrote:
>> 
>> > SCons, Waf, and Gradle are currently the tools of choice.
>> 
>> Gradle is (mostly) for Java-based projects, afaict?
> 
> It is the case that there are two more or less distinct domains of build
> -- JVM-oriented, and everything else.  There is though nothing stopping
> a single build system from trying to be more universal.  Sadly every
> attempt to date has failed for one reason or another (not necessarily
> technical).
> 
> Basically there seems to be a positive feedback loop in action keeping
> the two domains separate:  basically the tools from one domain don't
> work well on the opposite domain and so no-one uses them there, so no
> evolution happens to improve things.
> 
> In this particular case, Gradle has great support for everything
> JVM-related and no real support for C, C++, Fortran, etc.  All attempts
> to raise the profile of the Ant C/C++ compilation tasks, which Gradle
> could use trivially, have come to nothing.
> 

Do you have an opinion for the .NET world? I'm currently just using MSBuild, 
but know just enough to get it working. It sucks.