The frustration

I didn't start building HelpMake because I was bored. I started because CMake kept breaking on me.

It would not work for me, Cmake was bugging, crashing, complex to learn, annoying,...

At some point I realized I wasn't the only one. Every C++ Discord, every Reddit thread, every "what's wrong with my build" question, it's the same story. People don't hate CMake because it's bad. They hate it because it's a lot , and it breaks in ways that aren't obvious, and every project needs a slightly different incantation to make it work.

I don't build 100,000-file projects. I build 5–20 file projects. Sometimes 50. For that scope, CMake is a lot of machinery for a small job, and the failure modes are worse than the thing it's trying to solve.

So I built a build system where the whole config fits on one screen and you build with one command.

The CMakeLists.txt itself isn't really the problem. It's everything around it. The generator step. The out-of-source build requirement.…