I know little about gradle and have only just started exploring it, so this is just a question out of curiosity.
It’s supposedly a language agnostic dependency manager and builder, yet it seems to have only found its niche in Java. C/C++ projects could definitely do with dependency resolution…
Gradle is pretty awful actually, I’ve had to deal with it for years when I was writing Java. It’s pretty much the #1 reason I’ve stopped doing anything Java related.
Meson is the well designed option for C family languages. It also has support for Java, Rust, Swift, and a couple other languages. C is the most well supported though I think.
It also has a built-in dependency downloader that respects the system installed packages (and therefore distro packagers).
Gradle is so insanely over-engineered that it can do almost anything, yet so fragile that it can take weeks of bashing your head against the wall to get your build scripts working if you’re doing anything remotely complicated with your setup (or even just upgrading Gradle versions). Everything is so finicky that even if you do things exactly as the documentation says, you’ll still have to finagle things around nine times out of ten to get it to compile.
The user guide is longer than some novels.