Someone contributed an sconstruct file for a personal project of mine a long time ago. I needed a configure script to just set a few options a for a makefile but I got that instead. It seemed good at first but if you stray off the easy path it devolves into just a python script. You need to speak python because you start writing both configure and make in it.

Meson is another python based alternative which doesn't bleed into the makefile equivalent files. I don't use it myself because it lacked assembler support at one time.

It's been around for ages.

cmake and ninja, which can both be installed from PyPI. There's also a compiled 1:1 clone of ninja called samurai (samu).