Yeah; generally I find CMake rules are much easier to read and modify than autotools and makefiles. With Makefiles there’s about 18 different ways to write a rule to compile something, and I find I need to go hunting through a bunch of files to figure out how this makefile in particular defined a rule for compiling this C file in particular. CMake is much higher level. I can just see all the higher level targets, and how they’re built. Then - orthogonally - I can modify the build system that CMake uses to compile C code. It makes a lot more sense.

But I’d take cargo over any of this stuff. Cargo means I don’t have to think about compiler flags at all.