Cake itself contains only dependency graph scanner + parallel executor. Everything else can be written in C/C++ and linked into cakefile.
I just found cake-build/cake project on github (C#). Hope they won't sue me for name "cake": after all, if anyone has the right --- it's Valve. :)
See cakefile.cpp and console log screenshot.png.
Built on ArtixLinux for x86-64 with gcc 12.2.0, glibc 2.36. Depends on libxxhash.so.0.
Since I don't provide headers/libs for you to recompile ./cakefile.cpp in this demo, you have to keep target/cakefile -- and with mtime greater than ./cakefile.cpp so cake does not try to recompile it.
You can only play with ./src tree, try commands shown on screenshot, and view cake -vv log to see how it works.