Well if you have a library or app without dependencies producing working Makefile for multiple platforms can work as with lua. But the moment you start introduc

Well if you have a library or app without dependencies producing working Makefile for multiple platforms can work as with lua. But the moment you start introducing dependencies on external libraries everything breaks very easily even between different flavors of Linux and build tools such as automake or cmake can mitigate the problem of finding correct paths and names. No-one loves such tools but they are not used without a reason.