Recently at work I have been learning about this fancy framework we are using in a product with high-performance networking requirement — the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). It is a set of user-space NIC drivers and related utility libraries (like fast buffer pools or queues) that enables an application to bypass the Linux kernel's networking stack, and directly send and receive packets from the hardware...
If you have been compiling open-source programs for some time, you almost certainly have used CMake. It's a very popular Makefile generator for C/C++ projects. Recently I have been trying to use CMake for non-C projects, and I find it worked well — CMake build scripts might not be so easy to write at first, but they are very flexible and can certainly be helpful if you want a custom build system for your project...