You should be able to build well-written code on a variety of modern systems using nothing more than a Makefile, or even just a shell script. See plan9port for an example of the latter.
The script takes into account differences in operating systems, without including thousands of lines of weird little leftovers from 30 years ago when you needed to check if you were actually running on a 16-bit Data General machine or whatever (I'm looking at you, autoconf)