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A comment on Why people were enthused about GCC early on in its life. Parent comment

Re:Why people were enthused about GCC early on in its life by jordigh on Monday February 02, 2015 @01:33PM (#8985800)
I think the idea of autoconf is great (test for features, not for versions). The implementation in m4 is sadness.

It's possible to do autoconf-style checks in other build systems, but not as easily. I don't know why most build systems seem to ignore the wisdom of autoconf.

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Re:Why people were enthused about GCC early on in its life by kevin_thibedeau on Monday February 02, 2015 @03:59PM (#8986927)
m4 is actually pretty awesome when fulfilling its original purpose of adding macros to programming languages. Certainly it's not hygienic and is a pain to debug but it can work wonders to bypass language limitations especially when dealing with assembly code.
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