There seems to be a kind of “network effect” here with CMake, considering how popular it is among C/C++ projects.
Meson is more or less equivalent in the functionality it provides. There is also Gradle, but it doesn’t seem to have gained much traction outside of Android development.
My personal favorite is Bazel (and others from the Blaze family of build systems). It uses a python-based language for describing build rules, an extensive documentation and developers that respond to issues. Among the downsides is the lack of proper dependency management which is critical for public, open source projects.
There is also Nix which takes it even further, but it requires much more involvement from the developer.
I come from a land where patents don’t really work. I often wonder, are there any examples of patents in the field of software engineering that worked like they supposed to, protecting small collectives from powerful corporations?
They would work well enough on the computers of that generation and painfully slow on today's supercomputers. Yes, just like the software we have today.
I was trying to express that Electron (and the like) is not an inherently bad thing. It allows to trade hardware capacity for easier development experience. Those developers who use it create useful software that works. And software that works in a given environment is exactly the point of the industry, is it not?
Imagine one day we get a computer able to perform operations unimaginably faster than what we have now. It would process Snapchat's dog filters in femtoseconds, firing up and tearing down millions of kubernetes clusters every frame (because it would be easier to write it that way). Would is still make sense to try and optimize software? Wouldn't it be more constructive to solve real-world tasks instead?
Hardware is fast and cheap, and it's getting even faster and cheaper. It's perfectly fine to utilize this power, if it makes developing products faster, easier or cheaper.
Now, there are still cases when you need to send a machine to roam the mountains of another planet. This may justify doing some assembly.
The car won't update itself, so:
1. Ignore any updates as they become available.
2. Problem solved.