This isn't new, CoffeeScript has included this for a while.
One thing to keep in mind is that Cake is tiny, the complete source shouldn't take more than a minute or 2 to read and understand[1] and is a nice example of CoffeeScript style.
You're right that it's not new in 1.6; I misread the page. It was new to me, however. And you're right that it's quite small, and easy to read.
Which allows me to pronounce that It's tiny because it's limited. What happens when the project bumps up against those limitations (parallel builds would be nice, or maybe default rules, or the ability to invoke and export environment variables to subprocesses, or...)? Will they abandon cake and move to a build system that already meets their more advanced needs?
Hell no. They'll add features. So the cake of 2019 will, assuming a still-robust coffeescript community, look a lot more like rake or ant or scons or cmake. It won't be tiny. It won't be easy to read. It will be yet another ridiculous build system.
The history of cake.coffee[1] suggests otherwise. It's been edited relatively few times since the initial checkin, mostly to make it compatible with node.js API changes, and sometimes to pare it down and simplify it. It was hardly touched at all in 2012. It is small and mindful of feature creep.
>Hell no. They'll add features. So the cake of 2019 will, assuming a still-robust coffeescript community, look a lot more like rake or ant or scons or cmake. It won't be tiny. It won't be easy to read. It will be yet another ridiculous build system.
Which you will be free not to use. Along with not using Coffeescript.
It appears that running `cake` doesn't check to see if there have been changes since the previous build. I wouldn't use a build system that didn't at least have this essential feature.
One thing to keep in mind is that Cake is tiny, the complete source shouldn't take more than a minute or 2 to read and understand[1] and is a nice example of CoffeeScript style.
[1]: http://coffeescript.org/documentation/docs/cake.html