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

@whitequark I'm almost afraid to ask but have you ever actually looked at msbuild, an almost obsessively single purpose automation scripting system that has had C++ building shoehorned into it in the most hacky weird way ever and has 2 very different execution engines (devenv & msbuild) that claim to execute it, and is used very widely on Windows projects because [.. no... I don't know why... ]