You are right, building native extensions seems to have been left behind with the whole move to configuration-based builds (using pyproject.toml, as opposed to

You are right, building native extensions seems to have been left behind with the whole move to configuration-based builds (using pyproject.toml, as opposed to the "script-based" builds, using setup.py). That said, the configuration format itself is supposed to be universal -- but apparently none of the current tools support building extensions. That means that you are stuck with distutils, which should be available as part of setuptools -- PEP632 offers some migration advice [0]. I'd also recommend asking for advice on the packaging discussion board [1]. EDIT: And there is also the PyPA's official packaging problems tracker, FWIW [2]. [0] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0632/#migration-advice https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0632/#migration-advice [1] https://discuss.python.org/c/packaging/14 https://discuss.python.org/c/packaging/14 [2] https://github.com/pypa/packaging-problems https://github.com/pypa/packaging-problems