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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

Not exactly creative but KISS. I use only Makefile for a C project that compiles on both Linux, BSD and Mac OS.

Point being that autoconf is often overkill for smaller C projects.

Have you made a cross-build system that compiles to all three on a single machine, or that works when run on each of the three? I've been working on a system based on gcc, MinGW64, and osxcross, but if that fails I'll use docker with crossbuild.

The Stockfish Makefile is probably the best example of this I've seen. It also does some advanced stuff I'm not sure I understand yet. Profiling, setting flags for CPU instructions and making profile builds, all with support for different C++ compilers. Pretty neat stuff from one of the best chess engines.

https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/...

I'm taking a grad school embedded systems class where we have to maintain a makefile that cross compiles to two different embedded platforms as well as compiles on the host machine.

We're doing it by calling a PLATFORM and using an IF statement in the makefile: make PLATFORM=HOST for example. The makefile then replaces the compiler variable, compiler flags, linker, flags, etc.

Linux's makefile is fairly easy to read, and has a very smart way of doing cross platform builds w/ gcc.

...unless you want to support more platforms and discover missing dependencies you never heard of before.

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