Feedback of someone who is used to manage large (>1500) software stack in C / C++ / Fortran / Python / Rust / etc:

- (1) Provide a way to compile without internet access and specify the associated dependencies path manually. This is absolutely critical.

Most 'serious' multi-language package managers and integration systems are building in a sandbox without internet access for security reasons and reproducibility reasons.

If your build system does not allow to build offline and with manually specified depdemdencies, you will make life of integrator and package managers miserable and they will avoid your project.

(2) Never ever build in '-03 -march=native' by default. This is always a red flag and a sign of immaturity. People expect code to be portable and shippable.

Good default options should be CMake equivalent of "RelWithDebInfo" (meaning: -O2 -g -DNDEBUG ).

-O3 can be argued. -march=native is always always a mistake.

- (3) Allow your build tool to be built by an other build tool (e.g CMake).

Anybody caring about reproducibility will want to start from sources, no binary. This also matter for cross compilation.

- (4) Please offer a compatibilities with pkg-config (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pkg-config) and if possible CPS (https://cps-org.github.io/cps/overview.html) for both consumption and generation.

They are what will allow interoperability between your system and other build systems.

- (5) last but not least: Consider seriously the cross-compilation use case.

It is common in the world of embedded systems to cross compile. Any build system that does not support cross-compilation will be de facto banned from the embedded domain.