if you like autotools we definitely aren't going to be friends
this is because autotools gives you the sort of brain damage that makes you look at some of the most atrocious interfaces in existence and go "This is good actually. I will go and argue with strangers about how good my dogshit collection of generated shell scripts is" instead of building anything that improves people's lives rather than worsening them
anyway I hate autotools and if you try to convince me that autotools are good I will probably hate you, too
people think I like cmake because I hate autotools. nothing could be further from truth. cmake is a barely-functioning pile of atrocious C++ that includes what is probably the second-worst interface of a build system. however, my hatred for autotools far eclipses my desire to never interact with cmake again, to the point where I ended up becoming a cmake expert against my wish and desire

I would strongly prefer to never use cmake again in any context (even though it would mean I don't get to charge people quite nice consulting fees to unfuck their CMake situation), but unfortunately people keep making build systems that are inexplicably somehow worse, like Bazel

(Bazel makes a lot of sense if you are Google, and is excruciatingly painful to use if you aren't Google. it's also almost completely undocumented; if you thought it was hard to figure out how to make CMake does something, allocate like 20× as much time for Bazel)

@whitequark You know it’s bad when the best option for building C code is a plain Makefile.