FWIW, the 19000 lines of "configure" for Varnish also check whether stdlib.h exists. Perhaps it's still useful today to do so in order to avoid obscure compilat

FWIW, the 19000 lines of "configure" for Varnish also check whether stdlib.h exists. Perhaps it's still useful today to do so in order to avoid obscure compilation issues or to catch problems on misconfigured systems early on? As an old-timer with ~30 years of programming experience, I have similar sentiments as the author about complex projects today, yet I also often feel that too much knowledge, accumulated in sometimes cumbersome form, is being thrown away and reinvented badly. There has to be a compromise somewhere and it's no surprise that projects in an old language like C, running on evolved systems like Unix, de facto standardized on Autoconf to make it a little easier for developers. Do I want to use it myself? Certainly not, I have the luxury of being able to choose a modern language that abstracts most (not all!) platform-specific issues away at compiler installation time, at the cost of having much fewer deployment options for my code.