Interesting and I hope eventually useful

Posted Apr 29, 2025 14:49 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
Parent article: Barnes: Parallel ./configure

This is interesting work and I hope it finds its way back into autotools (or whatever the configure machinery is called.) Some large projects run ./configure a bunch of times in different subdirectories and speeding that up would be a big win.

(I know there are people who hate autotools and think it should just go away, but that's not likely to happen any time soon, at least for C and C++ projects.)

Interesting and I hope eventually useful

Posted Apr 29, 2025 14:56 UTC (Tue) by bredelings (subscriber, #53082) [Link] (3 responses)

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=autoconf%2C...

This chart suggests that autoconf is waning, at least, compared to cmake.

What's really surprising is that prior to 1900, the usage of cmake was low, but substantially higher than auconf.

P.S. More seriously, I tried including "meson", but it was mostly finding physics references

Interesting and I hope eventually useful

Posted May 2, 2025 9:41 UTC (Fri) by agraven (subscriber, #159039) [Link] (2 responses)

I suspect that prior to 1900 the usage of cmake was in fact zero :p

Interesting and I hope eventually useful

Posted May 2, 2025 10:05 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

I agree about that :) . However, "cmake" is probably far more likely to show up as a typo (a transposition with "make" being a real word and "c" being an end-of-word letter often enough) than "autoconf".

Interesting and I hope eventually useful

Posted May 2, 2025 21:17 UTC (Fri) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

The Ngram page has helpful "search in Google Books" links, which show it's OCR errors rather than typos: the 19th century books are saying things like "at the point C make the angle ACD=ASB", or the 'c' is from a margin note or footnote marker etc. The old typesetters did their jobs properly, it's Google who's getting it wrong.

Interesting and I hope eventually useful

Posted Apr 29, 2025 15:22 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> (I know there are people who hate autotools and think it should just go away, but that's not likely to happen any time soon, at least for C and C++ projects.)

TTBOMK, its plans for C++ modules are "none", so its future on that front is definitely questionable if you ask me (though it is really more of an `automake` thing than `autoconf`, but they're so intertwined…). There's one enterprising developer that's been looking at making it more "native" to GCC (but I haven't seen any news on that front for over a month), but this means (more or less) embedding a build system in the compiler which is unlikely to really be all that effective or standard between implementations.