Apparently that's a build tool that uses lua rather than some bastardized config language (like CMake does), and otherwise is somewhat inspired by CMake?:

https://github.com/premake/premake-core/wiki/What_Is_Premake

https://github.com/premake/premake-core

There are apparently some alpha-level work for supporting ninja as a backend: https://github.com/jimon/premake-ninja