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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

The zlib code has to make numerous workarounds for old compilers that do not understand ANSI-C or to accommodate systems with limitations such as operating in a 16-bit environment.

This is true for many older open source libraries. I wonder:

- Are old platforms still tested as time passes? Is it really worth it maintaining extra cruft for old systems even if it is unknown whether it still works? Are there projects running CI for OS/2 Warp, MS-DOS, or A/UX?

- How many users of old or obscure platforms are there still around? Are they even updating such libraries?

- What platforms do we need to get rid of to get rid of autoconf/automake/configure and use e.g. CMake instead?

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A lot even limit their codebases to C89, which I don't understand. Are there really that many platforms/compilers that don't effectively support C99 or greater? Is sixteen years not long enough for a language feature set to stabilize?

Maybe there are tradeoffs or platforms I'm just not aware of, but I at least tend to use C99 as the LCD.

That's mostly because of Microsoft's horribly outdated C-compiler

Why would anyone use VS to compile cross-platform C on Windows when there's MinGW (and clang-cl)?

Debug info, ubiquity, simplicity of combining with an otherwise VS based project.

At least VS now supports most of C99. Most. Now about that C11...

Having code that's easy to integrate with existing projects is definitely a really good thing, and I honestly don't like to neglect Windows, but with all due respect, the platform kind of does it to itself.

C11 would be really nice to see as an LCD, especially for threading (or even just a native POSIX threads implementation).

I was more thinking of language features. threads.h would be nice, but, as you may know, despite it being a pretty simple API, neither glibc nor OS X libc has implemented it - there's only musl and then compatibility shims. Sigh. You could blame a lack of demand, but I'd call that chicken and egg: the whole advantage of it over pthreads in theory is portability due to standardization, but as long as the portability remains theory, so does the advantage.

Wasn't this one of main reasons that thenNeoVim project was started?

> What platforms do we need to get rid of to get rid of autoconf/automake/configure and use e.g. CMake instead?

Why would you want that? Autotools is the devil we know. CMake has its own problems and from a statistical sample of one project implementing both, I came to the conclusion that CMake is more frustrating than Autotools when you need to do something unusual.

Exactly. autotools is exceptionally well designed for dealing with more exotic use cases like cross compiling. When designing a cross-compiling linux distribution(http://exherbo.org/docs/multiarch.txt) we discovered that autotools is by far the easiest to deal with when it comes to arbitrary host & build targets, compilers, etc. I would be even bolder and say that:

Those who do not understand autotools are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.

Exactly. autotools is exceptionally well designed for dealing with more exotic use cases like cross compiling.

...and it cannot deal with non-exotic use cases like non-UNIX environments (think Windows + Visual Studio) well at all. In contrast, with CMake you can generate an nmake file or Visual Studio project with one command.

On the other hand, with autotools you can cross-compile for Windows using MinGW.

Just like someone under unix could always just use mono's xbuild to build a project using visual studio's .vsproj files. Course, people tend to get grumpy when you tell them that they have to jump through hoops to use your project, just like your suggestion...

I use CMake to cross-compile firmware for my home automation hardware. It doesn't seem too bad, just a single file shared across all projects that defines the compiler binaries and settings. I like it much better than autotools.

Do you have an example online somewhere? This might be useful to have as a reference in the future.

http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/CMake_Cross_Compiling

Note that autotools handles all that (referencing also your link in another child comment) for you with no extra work. Writing a autoconf script for a native architecture means your project should compile for a cross arch.

It is for that reason I much prefer autotools, especially at the distribution level where you really don't want to be patching things. CMake can work, but I have had to do more patching for CMake build systems than I have had to for autotools; on that basis I consider autotools "better", at least for our use case.

I came to the conclusion that CMake is more frustrating than Autotools when you need to do something unusual.

Unusual in terms of...? If I have learnt anything from Go, Java (per Maven), etc. it's that the far majority of project don't need to do something unusual.

Conversely, if you give people the room to do unusual things, they will.

CMake. Ugh. It solves some problems and creates many, many more in the process.

There's a certain simplicity from the perspective of the user that configure && make && make install works most of the time.

CMake requires a lot of effort to get running by comparison.

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