Not so much with Rust in the driver's seat. Cargo, Rust's primary toolchain, only has weak support for pre/post build scripts. It's solely concerned with Rust's own dependencies and compilation. In the couple of projects where I've added Rust to a larger project, it's always been bash or node that coordinates the overall build.
You can call a compiler for C/C++ from build.rs. That tooling is currently not very advanced. As far as I know there is no crate to write compile recipes that as easily as a Makefile or CMakeLists.txt.
When I tried this in build.rs, I had to check modification times myself.
There is an opening for a ninja-type crate in Rust.
