Premake is a simple, powerful build configuration tool. The build script is described using Lua. (You don’t need to install Lua, as it comes embedded in the tool which itself is written in C.) Premake can generate project files for MS Visual Studio, GNU Make, Apple XCode and many other build tool chains and IDEs. This is probably the most promising build configuration tool I ever came across!

I have no experience using Firebird in a real project, but I feel that it is worthy of enjoying the same status and popularity as other Free/Open Source database servers. Originally derived from Borland's Interbase,  it gives us MVCC (Multi Generational Architecture, as the documents call it), transactions, procedures, character sets and huge databases. All this comes in an amazingly tiny footprint. The entire server can be built into an embeddable library, reported to be somewhere around just 4MB in size!.