That's not even the half of it. Dealing with the differences between compilers, oftentimes preemptively, and various standards. For a very long time, it was com

That's not even the half of it. Dealing with the differences between compilers, oftentimes preemptively, and various standards. For a very long time, it was common to build under c89 "just in case". Now you have to deal with the differences between c89, c99, and various industry/internal standards. That's not even considering how configurable compilers are, and all the features to consider. Then as you said, make or IDE. Much of this isn't necessarily specific to C (lots of toolchains include build scripts, complicated settings, different language revisions, standards, ect., ect., ect.) It does feel especially bad in C though.