I don't know if you can use Ant. I usually work with Java but the books I've read on Ant say that there are c++ packages built for it. I do know that it is WAY faster than make. The main reason being that all of the recursive and secondary processing is done with in the JVM ( ant being java based ) while Make, at least the builds I work with, seem to start up things over and over again. It could be that my make build is horribly written ;)