SCons: A software construction tool

SCons: A software construction tool

What is SCons?
SCons is an Open Source software construction tool—that is, a next-generation build tool. Think of SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches such as ccache. In short, SCons is an easier, more reliable and faster way to build software.
"SCons is a fantastic build system, written in Python (1.5.2) that does lots of nice things like automated dependencies, cross platform operation, configuration, and other great stuff. I would have to say that it is probably going to be the best thing for building C/C++ projects in the near future."
— Zed A. Shaw, Bombyx project lead
What makes SCons better?

* Configuration files are Python scripts--use the power of a real programming language to solve build problems.
* Reliable, automatic dependency analysis built-in for C, C++ and Fortran--no more "make depend" or "make clean" to get all of the dependencies. Dependency analysis is easily extensible through user-defined dependency Scanners for other languages or file types.
* Built-in support for C, C++, D, Java, Fortran, Yacc, Lex, Qt and SWIG, and building TeX and LaTeX documents. Easily extensible through user-defined Builders for other languages or file types.
* Building from central repositories of source code and/or pre-built targets.
* Built-in support for fetching source files from SCCS, RCS, CVS, BitKeeper and Perforce.
* Built-in support for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and past Visual Studio versions, including generation of .dsp, .dsw, .sln and .vcproj files.
* Reliable detection of build changes using MD5 signatures; optional, configurable support for traditional timestamps.
* Improved support for parallel builds--like make -j but keeps N jobs running simultaneously regardless of directory hierarchy.
* Integrated Autoconf-like support for finding #include files, libraries, functions and typedefs.
* Global view of all dependencies--no more multiple build passes or reordering targets to build everything.
* Ability to share built files in a cache to speed up multiple builds--like ccache but for any type of target file, not just C/C++ compilation.
* Designed from the ground up for cross-platform builds, and known to work on Linux, other POSIX systems (including AIX, *BSD systems, HP/UX, IRIX and Solaris), Windows NT, Mac OS X, and OS/2.