Investigate using build system other than Python / distutils / setuptools

[dhermes]

• http://scikit-build.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ (http://scikit-build.readthedocs.io/en/latest/generators.html)
• https://github.com/pybind/cmake_example
• https://pypi.org/project/enscons/
• https://github.com/waf-project/waf
• http://pycompilation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
• http://cournape.github.io/Bento/

[dhermes]

I've recently seen some interesting Python-specific tools:

• https://bit.ly/scipy2018-slicer-talk
• https://blog.kitware.com/18772-2/
• https://blog.kitware.com/ninja-python-wheels/
• https://pypi.org/project/ninja/
• https://github.com/scikit-build/ninja-python-distributions
• http://cmake-python-distributions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
• https://github.com/python-cmake-buildsystem/python-cmake-buildsystem
• Building a C extension with flit (Build steps? pypa/flit#119 start of starts this conversation, but it doesn't seem to be high-priority at the moment)

And non-Python:

• https://conan.io (C/C++ specific but support for gcc may let gfortran in the back door)
• https://spack.io (No Windows support. Similar to SCons in that the configuration is a Python DSL.)