premake¹ feels like an elegant autoconf alternative to me, and can be combined with various build systems including make. The syntax is far nicer than cmake too, but frankly that bar isn’t very high.

Sadly, it isn’t used by all that many projects² which holds me back from wanting to depend on it. I have played with it in a few personal projects though, and have been impressed.

1. https://premake.github.io/ 2. https://github.com/premake/premake-core/wiki/Who-Uses-Premak...