Besides Make, I guess Bazel kind of fits the bill? It was very "Googly" last time I checked it out, but I think that was a decade ago and right when it was released, so it might be more fitting for not-Google nowadays.
Imagine that instead of a make target listing its dependencies, you had to pull them out into a separately maintained BUILD file.
That’s not quite true, but it feels like it sometimes. Bazel is nice about seeing exactly what you need to rebuild if you touch a file. It’s very, very complex though.
In code terms, think of it as a framework that you have to embed your project into, not a Makefile or such that you’d drop into a project. That doesn’t make it bad and it has its niceties. You’ve gotta be prepared to pay for them with sweat equity.
