is cmake worth studying / using?

[nexos]

That is very true nullplan. What I think is that you need to balance less code to not introduce bugs and enough optimization to make it fast. In my OS, I use a bitmap physical memory manager, as it is very simple. Not nearly as fast as a free stack approach by default, but in about 10 or 20 lines of code, I managed to optimize to make it almost as fast as a free stack system by using a cache for the allocator. The end result? Simple code, yet optimized to make it fast. But in the production world, speed trumps most things (except security), so perfect speed requires complexity. But "good enough" speed can be done simply.