While imake is used primarily as a helper-tool to build some X apps, imake can certainly be used for non-X things. However, given that it's distributed as
part of X, it's unlikely you're going to have it available if you don't have X installed.
I find that rolling your own makefiles is usually for the best. My experiences with generators such as autotools and imake has been vexing at best -- autotools in particular is so badly supported, breaks backwards compatibility so often, and just plain
breaks in so many places that it's not worth the trouble. At least a custom makefile you can rewrite yourself when it broken.