> It's not that newer build systems don't have their own issues, they just try to address the historical problems that people have experienced from using things

> It's not that newer build systems don't have their own issues, they just try to address the historical problems that people have experienced from using things like Autotools for decades I totally agree with what you said. And I am not defending Autotools here. I would even advise any new person here to NOT use Autotools if they can and stick to something more modern ( CMake, Meson or other). There is however many reason why C build systems are what they are (heterogeneity of platforms, multiples compilers, ABI, multiple standards and multiple build systems themselves to deal with) that many other languages do not have (or not yet ?). And it would be good to understand that before calling them dumpster fire because they are not as convenient as your cargo install. This is not helping and deeply counter-productive. This is this kind of attitude that headed to the situation that we have currently : 100 build systems and even more problems because almost none of them took lessons of the past (Scons, Waf, imake, B2, QMake, qbs, etc, etc ).