If you are targeting a GNU/Linux system and possibly other Unix like systems you can use pkg-config for this. All of the mainstream Linux distros support and us

If you are targeting a GNU/Linux system and possibly other Unix like systems you can use pkg-config for this. All of the mainstream Linux distros support and use pkg-config, but I'm less sure about the BSD systems and MacOS since I've never used those before but from what I gather it should work for them too. Most Windows users probably don't have pkg-config installed but I also am not familiar with Windows. Anyways if you are targeting platforms that support it, pkg-config will automatically generate the required flags for you, you can append them to a variable however you like, and later pass that variable to the compiler and linker. You can try this out in a shell session if you are curious, try running: pkg-config gl --cflags --libs You can see what libraries it knows about by running: pkg-config --list-all Even when not using make directly a lot of build systems will be using pkg-config "under the hood"! Cmake is an exception here and has it's own way of doing this, but you can configure it to use what you want. Just to be clear I am not saying makefiles are good or bad or what you should use, I just wanted to mention pkg-config because it's pretty cool and useful to know about. The real answer to your question is to just use cmake I think!