> Microsoft (TM) knows better and sees backwards compatibility as the holy grail This is true, they have a regrettable habit of inventing a new GUI toolkit eve

> Microsoft (TM) knows better and sees backwards compatibility as the holy grail This is true, they have a regrettable habit of inventing a new GUI toolkit every few years, but they're good at ensuring the old ones still work. > While the traditional buildsystem used on UNIX, autoconf, has its warts, it was designed in such a way that only the application developer required the full set of tools, whereas the consumer requires only a POSIX compatible shell environment and a make program. > > More "modern" build systems like cmake and meson don't give a damn about the dependencies a user has to install True, you have to install CMake to build packages that use CMake, but I'm not sure it would be possible for CMake to generate a shell script the way autotools does, without losing either its scripting power or its portability to non-Unix platforms (e.g. Visual Studio). Personally though I don't score this very high up the list of things wrong with CMake. [0][1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24565266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24565266 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24203172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24203172