While few tools match up to Cargo, CMake is still uniquely unpleasant in my view. Most others aren’t fully imperative programming languages and at least have some ability or convention for locating sources. Many serve as a package manager or they dovetail nicely with a package manager. Go’s package manager story is a work in progress but I still prefer it to CMake (no contest).
My point isn’t that you should use a different language, my point is that CMake doesn’t compare to the tooling in other languages and there isn’t a compelling reason—it’s success is a historical accident, and I hope the community arrives at something better. I’m of the impression that there are other tools that are interested in solving this problem and I wish them luck.
