Comment by iforgotpassword

Comment by iforgotpassword 12 hours ago

14 replies

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The other issue is that people seem to just copy configure/autotools scripts over from older or other projects because either they are lazy or don't understand them enough to do it themselves. The result is that even with relatively modern code bases that only target something like x86, arm and maybe mips and only gcc/clang, you still get checks for the size of an int, or which header is needed for printf, or whether long long exists.... And then the entire code base never checks the generated macros in a single place, uses int64_t and never checks for stint.h in the configure script...

IshKebab 10 hours ago

I don't think it's fair to say "because they are lazy or don't understand". Who would want to understand that mess? It isn't a virtue.

A fairer criticism would be that they have no sense to use a more sane build system. CMake is a mess but even that is faaaaar saner than autotools, and probably more popular at this point.

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  • smartmic 2 hours ago

    I took the trouble (and even spent the money) to get to grips with autotools in a structured and detailed way by buying a book [1] about it and reading as much as possible. Yes, it's not trivial, but autotools are not witchcraft either, but as written elsewhere, a masterpiece of engineering. I have dealt with it without prejudice and since then I have been more of a fan of autotools than a hater. Anyway, I highly recommend the book and yes, after reading it, I think autotools is better than its reputation.

    [1] https://nostarch.com/autotools2e

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  • xiaoyu2006 7 hours ago

    Autotools use M4 to meta-program a bash script that meta-programs a bunch of C(++) sources and generates C(++) sources that utilizes meta-programming for different configurations; after which the meta-programmed script, again, meta-programs monolithic makefiles.

    This is peak engineering.

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    • krior 6 hours ago

      Sounds like a headache. Is there a nice Python lib to generate all this M4-mumbo-jumbo?

      Reply View 1 reply
      • lionkor 2 hours ago

        "Sounds complicated. I want it to throw exceptions and have significant whitespace on top of all that complexity!"

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  • knorker 5 hours ago

    autotools is the worst, except for all the others.

    I'd like to think of myself as reasonable, so I'll just say that reasonable people may disagree with your assertion that cmake is in any way at all better than autotools.

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    • IshKebab 3 hours ago

      Nope, autotools is actually the worst.

      There is no way in hell anyone reasonable could say that Autotools is better than CMake.

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      • pletnes an hour ago

        Configure-make is easier to use for someone else. Configuring a cmake based project is slightly harder. In every other conceivable way I agree 100% (until someone can convince me otherwise)

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      • tpoacher 2 hours ago

        And presumably the measure by which they are judged to be reasonable or not is if they prefer CMake over Autotools, correct? :D

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rollcat 9 hours ago

This.

Simple projects: just use plain C. This is dwm, the window manager that spawned a thousand forks. No ./configure in sight: <https://git.suckless.org/dwm/files.html>

If you run into platform-specific stuff, just write a ./configure in simple and plain shell: <https://git.suckless.org/utmp/file/configure.html>. Even if you keep adding more stuff, it shouldn't take more than 100ms.

If you're doing something really complex (like say, writing a compiler), take the approach from Plan 9 / Go. Make a conditionally included header file that takes care of platform differences for you. Check the $GOARCH/u.h files here:

<https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/refs/heads/release-branch.g...>

(There are also some simple OS-specific checks: <https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/refs/heads/release-branch.g...>)

This is the reference Go compiler; it can target any platform, from any host (modulo CGO); later versions are also self-hosting and reproducible.

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  • knorker 4 hours ago

    Interesting that you would bring up Go. Go is probably the most head-desk language of all for writing portable code. Go will fight you the whole way.

    Even plain C is easier.

    You can have a whole file be for OpenBSD, to work around that some standard library parts have different types on different platforms.

    So now you need one file for all platforms and architectures where Timeval.Usec is int32, and another file for where it is int64. And you need to enumerate in your code all GOOS/GOARCH combinations that Go supports or will ever support.

    You need a file for Linux 32 bit ARM (int32/int32 bit), one for Linux 64 bit ARM (int64,int64), one for OpenBSD 32 bit ARM (int64/int32), etc…. Maybe you can group them, but this is just one difference, so in the end you'll have to do one file per combination of OS and Arch. And all you wanted was pluggable "what's a Timeval?". Something that all build systems solved a long time ago.

    And then maybe the next release of OpenBSD they've changed it, so now you cannot use Go's way to write portable code at all.

    So between autotools, cmake, and the Go method, the Go method is by far the worst option for writing portable code.

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    • rollcat 3 hours ago

      I have specifically given an example of u.h defining types such as i32, u64, etc to avoid running a hundred silly tests like "how long is long", "how long is long long", etc.

      > So now you need one file for all platforms and architectures where Timeval.Usec is int32, and another file for where it is int64. And you need to enumerate in your code all GOOS/GOARCH combinations that Go supports or will ever support.

      I assume you mean [syscall.Timeval]?

          $ go doc syscall
    [...]
    Package syscall contains an interface to the low-level operating system
    primitives. The details vary depending on the underlying system [...].
      Do you have a specific use case for [syscall], where you cannot use [time]?
      Reply View 0 replies
epcoa 9 hours ago

> either they are lazy or don't understand them enough to do it themselves.

Meh, I used to keep printed copies of autotools manuals. I sympathize with all of these people and acknowledge they are likely the sane ones.

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rbanffy 10 hours ago

It’s always wise to be specific about the sizes you want for your variables. You don’t want your ancient 64-bit code to act differently on your grandkids 128-bit laptops. Unless, of course, you want to let the compiler decide whether to leverage higher precision types that become available after you retire.

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