GNU Autotools
Ranked 10 of 17 build systems by recommenders
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.
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.
32 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 12
- criticize it
- 20
- approval share
- 38%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 12 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 6 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Compiles on old or varied machines
“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.”
Comment from 13 Oct 2026 in “A plea not to use uv-build” “They do care that the code can compile on their (possibly old) machine.”
Comment from 5 Aug 2026 in “Faster Than Ninja” Easier and simpler than alternatives
“my whole blog post is about how autotools does that easily”
Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “Go is portable, until it isn't” “Instead I used Autotools which is way easier and simpler.”
Comment from 15 Dec 2025 in “Adafruit: Arduino’s Rules Are ‘Incompatible With Open Source’”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Complicated and hard to maintain
“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.”
Comment from 25 Apr 2026 in “Turbo Vision 2.0 – a modern port” “obscenely rococo scripts and Makefiles tens of thousands of lines long”
Comment from 22 Apr 2026 in “Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux” “rely heavily on the abominations that are autotools and cmake”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “Go's Sweet 16” - Comment from 25 Nov 2025 in “Migrating to Bazel symbolic macros”
- Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “Software Engineering Is Back”
Breaks in custom or cross-compiling setups
“I have yet to see an autotools project that works out of the box in my custom environment.”
Comment from 5 Aug 2026 in “Faster Than Ninja” “autotools doesn't work when cross compiling”
Comment from 13 Nov 2025 in “Rust in Android: move fast and fix things” Old and should be replaced
“It's an old legacy technology that needs to die out from all forms of distributions”
Comment from 19 Dec 2025 in “XZ Utils Backdoor” “And maybe let's move towards getting rid of autotools”
Comment from 6 Jul 2026 in “Dependencies should be fetched directly from VCS” “I'm never touching autotools or cmake again!”
Comment from 15 Oct 2026 in “Problems with the Rust Language” - Comment from 22 Apr 2026 in “Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux”
Other build systems people recommend
The four most recommended other build systems, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bazel | 79 | 41 | 66% | 12 | 3 yrs3 owners | — |
| GNU Make | 76 | 42 | 64% | 12 | — | — |
| CMake | 58 | 93 | 38% | 12 | — | — |
| Apache Maven | 44 | 42 | 51% | 12 | — | — |
| GNU AutotoolsThis page | 12 | 20 | 38% | 6 | — | — |
What people said
29 of the 34 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I ended up with 8 separate autotools versions”
“I'm never touching autotools or cmake again!”
“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.”
“I have yet to see an autotools project that works out of the box in my custom environment.”
“They do care that the code can compile on their (possibly old) machine.”
“biggest waste of CPU time imaginable”
“And maybe let's move towards getting rid of autotools”
“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.”
“it provides by far the best UX for a user”
“obscenely rococo scripts and Makefiles tens of thousands of lines long”
“autotools felt old even in 90's”
“instead of dealing with CMake and Autotools, I now have to deal with CMake, Autotools and Meson”
“After reading about GNU Autotools I was wondering why the C/C++ folks still suffer?”
“autotools (incredible monstrocity)”
“autotools and pkgconfig is fine.”
“I hate autotools, but I have stockholm syndrome so I still use it.”
“It's an old legacy technology that needs to die out from all forms of distributions”
“my whole blog post is about how autotools does that easily”
“Instead I used Autotools which is way easier and simpler.”
“the horrible agglomeration of m4 macros that is Autotools”
“I'd still prefer that to all the problems you get from CMake, autotools and Makefiles.”
“ubiquitous use of autotools”
“Autotools is far too pessimistic”
“rely heavily on the abominations that are autotools and cmake”
“Any C program shipped with GNU Autotools is fairly straightforward to package as a Deb or rpm”
“autotools doesn't work when cross compiling”
“at least with autotools it's easy for me to see the available configuration options”
“You seem to forget about autotools.”
“I'll take autotools and gtk over next.js everytime.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.