Just to disagree, I think it's a deficiency (one of the biggest one) of CMake because CMake, as a "build" tool, does not support parallel builds because it depends on other build tools, including bad ones. I really don't understand why CMake can't build things directly, it's one of its biggest deficiencies.
One of the most important requirements of a build tool is to build software *fast* and *portably*, without having to rely on other programs.
fwiw, systems like ninja [1] are designed to support fast and parallel builds, the syntax is designed for that use-case, and it is designed to be generated (by cmake or gyp). otoh, fast compile times are not necessarily the only requirement: parallel builds with ninja render windows unresponsive, so it are much more suited for buildservers (macos is better, linux doesn't have this issues). so as developer your productivity may be lower, even if the compile times are faster. otoh, developers who like IDEs may have a higher productivity due to debugger integration. [1] https://ninja-build.org/