There was a post on HN (I believe) a couple of months ago concerning a research paper that explores "What defines a makefile" concluding that by their definition, Excel can be used as one. I've looked around the internet and can't find it, so if anyone else remembers it and has it upvoted or otherwise has the link, posting it would add to this conversation. It had interesting discussion of graphs and requirements and was overall a worthwhile read.
I'm pretty sure I found that seminal paper, "Build Systems a la Carte", via HN, but indeed can't find a highly-commented story on the topic. Perhaps the most upvoted story was this one about a blog post from one of the authors (itself very interesting): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17494016
It is a very important paper, I think, mapping out the landscape of build systems designs. But I'm still waiting for something novel to emerge from it. I know the authors planned on integrating the improvements they found into (Cloud) Shake, but I don't know if that's production-ready.
Perhaps Bazel is the best we can hope for at this time.
