It can build a Rust program (build.rs) which builds things that aren't Rust, but that's an entirely different use case (building non-Rust library to use inside of Rust programs).
There's GprBuild (Ada tool) that can build C (not sure about C++). It also has more elaborate configuration structure, but I didn't use it extensively to tell what exactly and how exactly does it do it. In combination with Alire it can also manage dependencies Cargo-style.
still slow, even if it does multiple processes - lots of "discovery" that are only on your machine, or whatever the CI machine had in mind. Instead it should be - "You should expect this, that and that", and by nature of building it - it fails.
I don't think I'd want a "fail late with a possibly unclear error" build system. There is also the problem that finding the path of dependencies happens at the same time as finding if you have them, and removing one without the other doesn't seem to be very useful.
At best, I think you could have a system that defers some / most dependency discovery until after configure time, but still aborts the build with "required libfoo >= 0.81.0 not found" if necessary.
And no, you are not going to be able to tell everyone exactly where everything needs to be installed unless it's an internal product.
Sure, to all to their needs. In my case I want reproducible build, but to start I first want build that at least passes the same compiler flags around, and links same things no matter what the computer is (it can still be different when comes to OS).
