I don't work in a shop where performance/speed is important, but I am looking for other ways to do things I would do in Make but...not in Make.

For example, my use-case is similar to what Mike Bostock described in "Why Use Make" [0] when explaining how he uses Make to build out his data tranformation process. Most of my work is data transformation/small-scale ETL, but I just haven't been able to get into Make beyond trivial work, and I often end up writing things in Rake (Ruby).

So I was wondering if other devs had tried using Buck/Bazel for everyday hobbies and projects, and whether you stuck with the new tool or went back to Make? The portability of Makefiles isn't a high priority for me, and I like experimenting with different systems for my own projects.

Closest in spirit to make, and does essentially all you want to do is "redo", concept drafter by djb, implemented independently by apenwarr[0] and by others. apenwarr's version has a super short "do" script (a couple of hundred lines of portable sh IIRC) which uses the same configuration but does a full rebuild each time.

The two weak points are: (1) multiple outputs from a compilation step (yytab.c yytab.h from yacc) is not properly supported, and (2) no windows support. Other than that it's the perfect minimalistic make replacement -- what make should have been.

Additionally, there tup[1]. With some assumptions about the build process that usually hold in non-distributed builds, it is the fastest, simplest make replacement; You just write a list of commands that builds your final outputs, and by tracing the processes it figures out exactly what needs to be done next time -- nothing more, and nothing less.

[0] https://github.com/apenwarr/redo [1] http://gittup.org/tup/