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Yes, the Makefiles were an abomination. Nobody could understand them. The reason the makefiles are so heavily macroized like they are is because of cross-compile bootstrapping, where the build rules are the same in many configurations, with slight differences. Effectively, large swaths of the makefiles were parameterized over 4 different values.

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Sincere question - why not use autotools? It's a lot easier writing a Makefile.am declaring the parts of the project and having platform specific stuff handled by autoconf.

I find autotools very complex and bloated, but it tends to make builds for different platforms, cross compilation, dependency checking and other tasks easy for me. It's often easier than dealing with (g)make directly IMHO.

The answer here is probably "bootstrapped compilers are hard". Rust compiles itself thrice in a typical compile (most devs do fewer stages when hacking), and the makefile needs to distinguish between these, and it gets more complex while cross compiling where your host/target change halfway through the process. So it's quite possible that it's easier to make work in pure make.

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