There is a problem but you&#x27;re looking at it the wrong way.<p>What&#x27;s in the compiler&#x27;s machine code generation phase that the build system needs to know about? If nothing, then making a monolithic system is only going to make your life miserable.<p>Well-designed compilers are already split into (at least) two subsystems: frontend and backend. Frontend takes the program and spits an AST (very roughly speakign, although there is also the semantic-analysis phase, and intermediate-representation-generation phase). Backend is concerned with code generation. What your build systems needs is just the frontend part. Not only your build system, but also an IDE can benefit greatly from a frontend (which as one of the commenter pointed out, results in wasteful duplication of effort when and IDE writer decides to roll his&#x2F;her own language parser embedded in the tool).<p>I think AST and semantic-analyzer are going to play an increasing role in a variety of software development activities and it&#x27;s a folly to keep them hidden inside the compiler like a forbidden fruit.<p>And that&#x27;s the exact opposite of monolith. It&#x27;s more fragmentation, and splitting the compiler into useful and resusable pieces.<p>(At this point I have a tendency to gravitate towards recommending LLVM. Unfortunately I think it&#x27;s a needlessly complicated project, not the least because of being written in a needlessly complicated language. But if you&#x27;re okay with that it might be of assistance to your problems)