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Comment by EuAndreh | Hacker News Reader

The clear advantage that Autotools has is that it targets POSIX tools, which are the least common denominator.

m4, sh, make and friends are the shared part that every POSIX system has, without requiring any external extra tool, be it ninja/meson, etc.

Besides hand-coding a configure script that generates a Makefile yourself, Autotools is the most portable build system out there.

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Unless you're targeting a system that doesn't have POSIX tools, such as Windows (which happens to be one of the most common OSes at there!).

They've had native Windows ports for 20+ years.

AIUI, it requires mingw, which is definitely not the norm for most Windows developers, and which most Windows developers would not consider "native".

I have the same issue, Microsoft Visual C++ doesn't help me make my Linux software.

I've always wondered why there's no Emscripten-like tool, or WASM-like runtime, that shoves your code into a bytecode interpreter embedded within a portable POSIX shell-script.

With such a thing, nobody would ever have to write actual lowest-common-denominator /bin/sh scripts again. Autotools could just be a Rust program or whatever. (It'd run rather slowly, of course, but you wouldn't use it for the whole process — it'd just be a bootstrapping agent, used to configure the build of a native-compiled build tool.)

But the old systems, those with the "30 years of embedded knowledge of traps etc." - aren't necessarily POSIX-compliant. And there are different versions/parts of the POSIX standard. etc.

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