# GNU Autotools

12 Hacker News commenters recommended GNU Autotools and 20 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend it for building portable C programs that compile on many systems and package easily; critics agree it is complicated and hard to work with.

## Why people recommend it

- Compiles on old or varied machines (2 comments): "Sometimes you can get through the compile without any problems at all and the tool often works enough for your usecase and that's a win." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50079331)) "They do care that the code can compile on their (possibly old) machine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49185516))
- Easier and simpler than alternatives (2 comments): "my whole blog post is about how autotools does that easily" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46289970)) "Instead I used Autotools which is way easier and simpler." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46272259))

## What people warn about

- Complicated and hard to maintain (5 comments): "Autotools can be daunting if you plan to write code that’s portable to Ultrix, IRIX, Apollo’s UNIX whose name I forgot, NonStop, UNICOS, OpenVMS, z/OS, macOS, and modern Linux." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47900810)) "obscenely rococo scripts and Makefiles tens of thousands of lines long" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47867369)) "rely heavily on the abominations that are autotools and cmake" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45940263))
- Breaks in custom or cross-compiling setups (2 comments): "I have yet to see an autotools project that works out of the box in my custom environment." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187191)) "autotools doesn't work when cross compiling" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45921914))
- Old and should be replaced (4 comments): "It's an old legacy technology that needs to die out from all forms of distributions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46327562)) "And maybe let's move towards getting rid of autotools" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48799295)) "I'm never touching autotools or cmake again!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50098115))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Bazel](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bazel.md): 79 recommend
- [GNU Make](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gnu-make.md): 76 recommend
- [CMake](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cmake.md): 58 recommend
- [Apache Maven](https://hackerapproved.com/p/maven.md): 44 recommend
- [Ninja build system](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ninja.md): 37 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "GNU Autotools", https://hackerapproved.com/p/autotools/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).