reflex-ghci VS shake

Perhaps you could borrow some code from https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex-ghci even though it's terminal-oriented.

Another interesting implementation is Shake: https://shakebuild.com/

It is technically a Haskell DSL, but supports Ninja files, time estimates and has tools for linting and profiling.

They explicitly refer to Shake build system and Build Systems a la Carte paper.

The one paper that gave me hope about build systems was Build systems à la carte: Theory and practice, by Andrey Mokhov, Neil Mitchell, and Simon Peyton Jones. Among other things, it describes the theoretical underpinnings of the Shake build system. To be honest I believe any build system that ignores the maths described in this paper can safely be ignored. (You may however ignore the paper itself if the maths checks out. See Daniel J. Bernstein's redo, which matches Shake very closely.)

Yeah, they don't have to be terrible. I haven't used it, but people in my circles tend to really like Shake, which uses a Haskell embedded DSL to describe builds.

You could try Shake. It's a sane build system written by a former co-worker of mine. https://shakebuild.com/

Shake does require compilation as it's essentially just a Haskell library providing a DSL and it works just fine, I guess in gradle's case it's a thing about Java-typical overengineering and complete blindness to resource usage. Shake's underlying engine can actually go head-to-head with ninja itself when building ninja files.

Did you look at shake: https://shakebuild.com/ ?

For reasons I don't want to get into, I am building my own GHC package without cabal. The documentation is a little sketchy, but I've succeeded in build and installing it in my own user database (I'm on linux x86_64, using GHC 8.6.5). I am using shake to do all of this, and I've been pretty pleased with how it works.