And that's why I'm saying CMake should have been a library. We want the functionality of Make but not necessary the language. And Pnut shows us well that {language != functionality}.

For the sake of mental experiment, let's pretend Make is a separate executable, separate process, but with some sort of API. You can manage dynamic dependency graphs by calling its routines from C.

Now let's say Make is a dynamic library with all functionality exposed. You can invoke and manage subprocesses using its functions, but now your C program and the Make share a process together.

Now let's say Make is a C library. GNU Make is written in C so this is not impossible to imagine. Your C program shares the process, and the names on compilation+linking phase with Make, which is annoying. But you can still work with metadata using Make's facilities. Also now you can use all the tools: debuggers, profilers, static analyzers, dynamic analyzers - you use for the rest of your codebase.

We perceive C as a low-level language but, and Pnut shows it well, C is only a set of rules. We can write shell scripts with C rules. Why can't we then write build scripts?