When comparing Fabricate vs Tup, the Slant community recommends Tup for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source build systems for C/C++?” Tup is ranked 5th while Fabricate is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Tup is:
It is very fast.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Can run tasks in parallel
Pro Avoids any step doing nothing
Detects input/output file changes and if input files didn't change, doesn't run the command again.
Pro Easy to script
Fabricate uses Python as a scripting language. Being a fully usable language and an easy one at that, makes Fabricate rather easy to script.
Pro Speed
It is very fast.
Pro Tidy
It will automatically clean-up old files.
Pro General
Not bound to C/C++.
Pro Lua
Tup supports writing build definitions using Lua or Tupfiles.
Pro Cross platform
Supports Linux, OSX, and Windows.
Cons
Con Not maintained
Con Variants not working on Windows
The solution for having different build configuration (think Release/Debug) is broken on Windows.
Con Cannot incrementally modify or delete files
Cannot incrementally modify files (e.g. LaTeX PDF, VISing and LIGHTing Quake maps, which takes the same BSP file as input and output), and will not delete files (e.g. rm build/*.o).