I really like Ruby’s rake. It’s an actually sane language and quick to learn. No idiosyncratic shell scripts cobbled together. The makefile is written in plain Ruby. That also makes it super powerful to adapt to your needs. Nor parsing XML. Just load your rake file into your interactive Ruby shell (I’m partial to pry), try things, test it. Our time for debugging build errors dropped to a fraction.

I have used it build C++, Objective-C, and Java projects for a medium sized company. Before that we used ant with XML build files from hell.