The problem is autoconf because the problems that autoconf was designed to solve are not the problems we want to solve today. Autoconf does an excellent job of solving the problems that it was designed to solve--configuring a build system on different POSIX-like systems--but times have changed.
My experience using CMake and Autotools and migrating between the two is... the only appreciable benefit to CMake is that it works well enough on Windows, and Autotools sucks on Windows. Whereas Bazel is in a different league, IMO. For people on Windows, the fact that CMake works well on Windows is enough to sing its praises, but I think Bazel will be eating the C and C++ world over the next five years.
In defense of Autotools, it's designed to work on systems which don't have Autotools installed, back in an era where you might download Apache and compile it from source to get a web server running on your system. It will work on a stock install of Linux, Solaris, AIX, or macOS. Almost nobody cares about this use case any more.
> For people on Windows, the fact that CMake works well on Windows is enough to sing its praises,
Maybe, but how relevant is this? Application development on Windows is historically not based on open source, and for developing anything else than Windows apps, supporting something different from a POSIX system is not really important.
> but I think Bazel will be eating the C and C++ world over the next five years.
Do you think bazel is better than NixOS and GNU Guix? I think things like bazel are pretty much geared to big companies which want to move ecosystems to the cloud and have a lot of manpower to support very complex dependency systems. I think that for distributed open source projects, a system like Guix which decouples individual packages while suppurting (or even requiring) a build from source is better. There is also the issue that with a bazel build, there is potentially a whole lot of stuff which runs uncontrolled on your local system. It is basically "curl | bash" on stereoids, which means you hand over your machine to the cloud.
My experience using CMake and Autotools and migrating between the two is... the only appreciable benefit to CMake is that it works well enough on Windows, and Autotools sucks on Windows. Whereas Bazel is in a different league, IMO. For people on Windows, the fact that CMake works well on Windows is enough to sing its praises, but I think Bazel will be eating the C and C++ world over the next five years.
In defense of Autotools, it's designed to work on systems which don't have Autotools installed, back in an era where you might download Apache and compile it from source to get a web server running on your system. It will work on a stock install of Linux, Solaris, AIX, or macOS. Almost nobody cares about this use case any more.