John Calcote - Autotools: A practitioners guide to GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool

The GNU Autotools have been around for a long time. My own introduction to Autoconf was back in 1999, around the same time I began my first foray into the world of Open Source Software. I had obtained employment in a research lab using the Java language to control FPGA hardware, and one of my co-workers showed me a program he had found, jikes , which compiled our project nearly 10 times faster than javac from Sun. But it crashed on one corner case of string concatenation, and I was assigned to figure out why. The jikes compiler was an Open Source project from IBM written in C++, and I soon found and fixed the problem, and got the pleasure of seeing my patch accepted upstream.

Whats more, since jikes used GNU Autoconf to allow building it on multiple platforms, after I had fixed the initial bug using the Solaris 7 machines at my work, I was able to experiment with further fixes to jikes at home on my Microsoft Windows 95 personal machine, using the Cygwin project that I found on the internet to provide gcc . I did not immediately appreciate the magnitude of the portability problems that had already been solved to be able to build software across vastly different systems, because the Autotools already hid so much of that complexity. But over time, my interests shifted away from Java and more into cross-platform compatibility, where I started contributing patches for GNU M4, and later GNU Autoconf, and eventually reached the point where I took over as the maintainer for both projects. Although my employment and my active project contributions have changed, in the meantime, I still find myself using the Autotools on a regular basis.

The point of all this? While the Java programming language is still around, it looks much different than 20 years ago. Between such changes as the introduction of generic typing, a change in ownership when Oracle bought Sun, and my own career taking me down a different path focused on the C language, I find it hard to compare modern Java projects to the work I did back then. And the jikes project that I worked on? It is now obsolete, unmaintained because it never kept up with the changes in the language, and because the javac compiler itself improved in quality and speed, where jikes was no longer a strong competition. But in all that time, the GNU Autotools have still been in active use, as a backbone behind the many GNU/Linux distributions. Even if most Linux users these days have never personally interacted with running a configure script, and instead rely on the distribution to pre-package binaries, they are beneficiaries of the power of the Autotools in making it easy for the distributions to bundle so many Open Source products.