When comparing Rake vs Cake, the Slant community recommends Cake for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source build systems for C/C++?” Cake is ranked 12th while Rake is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Cake is:
Standard support for MSBuild, MSTest, xUnit, NUnit, NuGet, ILMerge, WiX and SignTool.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Powerful language
You can write code for your build system in Ruby. While not my choice for general programming, Ruby is powerful and expressive. Given some knowledge of Ruby, you can create powerful Rake extensions that result in your average target only needing a few lines in the rakefile in spite of having complex behaviors (Is the library for public consumption, or only for use within the current repo/tier? Compile certain files on certain platforms? Link to libraries published from other repos? etc.).
Pro Tools support
Standard support for MSBuild, MSTest, xUnit, NUnit, NuGet, ILMerge, WiX and SignTool.
Pro Cross platform
Windows, Linux and macOS versions available.
Cons
Con Slooooow
For large codebases or with complex extensions, Rake can become quite slow. I'm aware of one codebase on which it can take 15 minutes to determine that no changes have been made and no recompilation is necessary.
Con No GUI
Everything is script based, there is no graphical front end.