Autotools is part of the GNU toolchain and is widely used in many free software and open source packages.

One way to handle platform differences is to write conditionally compiled code (i.e. via #ifdef), but because of the wide variety of build environments, this approach quickly becomes unmanageable.

One can install the Cygwin or MSYS system on top of Windows to provide a Unix-like compatibility layer, though, allowing configure scripts to run.

The autoconf-generated configure script can be slow because it executes programs such as a C compiler multiple times to test whether various libraries, header files, and language features are present.

This particularly affects Cygwin, which, due to its lack of a native fork system call, may execute configure scripts considerably slower than on Linux.

It is a travesty that the configure idea survived.Kamp sketches the history of the build system in the portability problems inherent in the multitude of 1980s Unix variants, and bemoans the need for such build systems to exist: the 31,085 lines of configure for libtool still check if and exist, even though the Unixen, which lacked them, had neither sufficient memory to execute libtool nor disks big enough for its 16-MB source code.Although critics of the Autotools frequently advocate for alternatives that provide greater simplicity to their users, some have argued that this is not necessarily a good thing.

Anyone who has nothing but good things to say about this aspect of cmake, maven, gradle, or whatever, has simply not worked on a project that requires them to move far enough away from the defaults.