

It doesn’t seem to be based on petroleum, since they’re explicitly comparing it to petroleum-based plastics…
There also are other non-petroleum based plastics that dissolve in water. This part is not new. E.g. polyvinyl alcohol is used widely.
What’s new about this one is that it specifically needs salt to dissolve and they claim it’s otherwise relatively sturdy. So maybe it could be used instead of pet bottles for drinks? Or maybe they’re not quite there yet but it’s a new step in that direction…
I’m not sure about this… the build systems I work with are either so complex that something like cmake gets used because that way we can support multiple build systems on different platforms without maintaining five different projects, or they are so simple that it frankly doesn’t matter whether it’s make or something else.
And in the former case, i.e. the only case where I even care what tool we use, what I care about the most is speed, so I would want something like ninja instead of make (which cmake conveniently supports). I don’t want to micro-optimize by doing everything myself with redo.