Great resources, thank you! I think I came across some of these ideas before and it might have been as simple as me resenting the syntax. I'll touch up on my `make` knowledge and try to make Piper more ergonomic!
My comment was meant to be practical advice considering make's popularity. A while back I wanted to replace a legacy script that generated Makefiles for a project at work, and I started out by making something very similar to Piper in python so it was easy for coworkers, etc, but ended up finding the guide I mentioned in my above comment while doing gcc dependency generation. Since I was targeting make underneath anyways, and my needs were less complex than I thought, I ended up scrapping my redundant python build tool.
It's not going in the same direction you are exactly but building a mental model of it in my head was salutary in terms of thinking through the purpose and implementation of build tools and hopefully it'll be similarly useful to you.
If piper is clearer for you, it can "compile" down into make, and then let gmake do the heavy lift, at least for some of the early prototyping.
There are so many build systems that honestly... it is crazy to me.
(grabbing geezer stick) When I grew up we only had make... and we liked it! /s