There exists DJB's redo approach [0], which i implemented [1], where dependencies and non-existence dependencies are only recorded after the build. A typical dofile is a shell script, so you do not need to learn another language. Targets also automatically depend on their own build rules (I have seen such a thing only in makefiles authored by DJB).

I wrote a blog post to show how to integrate dependency output for both dependency and non-existence dependency generation [2]. The game “Liberation Circuit” can be built with my redo implementation; you can output a dependency graph usable with Graphviz [4] using “redo-dot”.

There is only one other redo implementation that I would recommend, the one from Jonathan de Boyne Pollard [5], who rightly notices that compilers should output information about non-existence dependencies [6].

I would not recommend the redo implementation from Avery Pennarun [7], which is often referenced (and introduced me to the concept), mainly because it is not implemented well: It manages to be both larger and slower than my shell script implementation, yet the documentation says this about the sqlite dependency (classic case of premature optimization):

> I don't think we can reach the performance we want with dependency/build/lock information stored in plain text files

[0] http://cr.yp.to/redo.html

[1] http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/bin/redo-sh.html

[2] http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/posts/redo-gcc-automati...

[3] https://github.com/linleyh/liberation-circuit

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphviz

[5] http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/redo/

[6] http://jdebp.eu./FGA/introduction-to-redo.html#CompilerDefic...

[7] https://github.com/apenwarr/redo