Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

The code generation I was really alluding to was not GCC's C->assembly transformations, but the various tools that run during a GCC build to turn machine description files into (often immense and ugly) C files implementing some aspect of those md files in the finished compiler. You could interpret the md files at runtime to implement the same behaviour, but it would be intolerably slow.

As for autotools' use of code generation, that has one raison d'etre: to ensure that a configure script has no dependencies other than on core shell-script tools. In this it is quite different from cmake and most other build tools (you can't build a cmake project without cmake installed). This property is probably an essential one for anything involved in the bootstrapping core (GNU Make has a similar trick, with a shell script that will build an initial make for you on a system that has none). This property is perhaps less important these days, when everyone has a Linux box at hand, but in the old days of proprietary Unix when even compilers were hard to come by and barely worked this property was essential.

As for 'make distclean', this is not an autotools thing but rather a make target defined in the GNU coding standards, and thus implemented even by GNU projects that do not use Autoconf at all. Automake happens to generate this target because part of its purpose is to make it easier to conform to the GNU coding standards by generating most of its mandated targets automatically.