1. Since make has builtin suffix rules, the Makefile could be simplified to:

    CXX=g++\n\n    hello: main.o factorial.o hello.o\n\n    clean:\n        rm -rf *o hello\n

\n2. Shameless plug: he didn't mention redo [1], which is simpler than make and more reliable.\nThe comparable redo scripts to the Makefile would be:

    cat < @all.do\n    redo hello\n    EOF\n\n    cat < hello.do\n    o='main.o factorial.o hello.o'\n    redo-ifchange $o\n    g++ $o -o $3\n    EOF\n\n    cat < default.o.do\n    redo-ifchange $2.cpp\n    g++ -c $1 -o $3\n    EOF\n\n    cat < @clean.do\n    rm -rf *o hello\n    EOF\n

\n[Edit: Note that these are heredoc examples showing how to create the do scripts.]

These are just shell scripts and can be extended as much as necesary.\nFor instance, one can create a dependency on the compiler flags with these changes:

    cat <

\nsed calls could be combined; separated here for readablility.

[1] https://github.com/gyepisam/redux

redo is pretty cool, but I ran into trouble with apenwarr's implementation (https://github.com/apenwarr/redo, see https://groups.google.com/d/msg/redo-list/GL5z8eEqT90/tk_vLZ...) with OS X Mavericks. I have no experience with the alternative implementation at https://github.com/gyepisam/redux, since it came out after I reimplemented the build system in question with CMake.

In general, I found CMake quite useable for my needs, and quite clean. It also required less build system code than redo. CMake fits quite nicely into a (C or C++) project which consists of many binaries and libraries which can depend on each other.