I recently tried out https://bazel.build/ and I think it has a lot of qualities to make @riidefi happy. While benefiting from all the goodies of a modern build system, we can keep almost the entire pack directory and sources.py (in Starlark, closely related to Python).
Pros:
Designed for "hermetic" (repeatable/deterministic) builds, perfect match for decomp
Considers build tools as sources so it can automatically fetch all compilers and tools
Great performance, on-par or sometimes faster than Ninja-based build systems
Supports dependency tracking, no more need for --match or --regen_asm
Great support for remote build execution, allowing us to host some fat Windows server somewhere that does all compile jobs
No more need to use Windows as dev OS
No more Wine
Much faster builds on non-Windows
Allows us to get rid of the Python subprocess crap
Bazel config language ends up being very readable (although a bit verbose)
Newcomers can easily add more sources without prior Bazel knowledge
Despite being readable, it's still the most complex build system I've seen yet.
Tough learning curve so this project will probably only have 1-2 people that fully understand the Bazel toolchain
But tbh, still great for learning, Bazel sells well on the job market
Java-based (however much like Gradle bundles the JRE and spawns a daemon process, so no noticeable overhead)
The builtin C/C++ toolchain doesn't fit well with decomp because it isn't granular enough to track per-object flags, so we'd need to write our own C rule set
I recently tried out https://bazel.build/ and I think it has a lot of qualities to make @riidefi happy. While benefiting from all the goodies of a modern build system, we can keep almost the entire pack directory and sources.py (in Starlark, closely related to Python).
Pros:
--matchor--regen_asmCons: