"Make is fine, but it’s not standard. Disturbingly large swathes of critical open source infrastructure are compiled using a hodgepodge of Make, autogenerated rules from autotools..."
"Companies should be paying for this directly: if pyca/cryptography actually broke on HPPA or IA-64, then HP or Intel or whoever should be forking over money to get it fixed or using their own horde of engineers to fix it themselves."
If pyca/cryptography breaks on HPPA or whatever, it's pyca's problem, not HPs or Intels. Unless your project is big enough that you already have HP or Intel working on it.
1. Autotools use make. GNU make, but make.
2. There's a historical reason for this goofiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars
"Companies should be paying for this directly: if pyca/cryptography actually broke on HPPA or IA-64, then HP or Intel or whoever should be forking over money to get it fixed or using their own horde of engineers to fix it themselves."
If pyca/cryptography breaks on HPPA or whatever, it's pyca's problem, not HPs or Intels. Unless your project is big enough that you already have HP or Intel working on it.