Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by malkia 359 days ago
Autoconf is the prime example of easy vs simple.

It looks easy on the surface to roll down support for any kind of operating system there is, based on auto-detection and then #if HAVE_THIS or #if HAVE_THAT, but it breaks in ways that maybe really hard to untangle later.

I'd rather have a limited set set of configurations targeting specific platforms/flavors, and knowing that no matter how I compile it, I would know what is `#define`-d and what is not, instead of guessing on what the "host" might have.