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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.