codys 9 hours ago

yep. C's really come a long way with the special operators for checking if attributes exist, if builtins exist, if headers exist, etc.

Covers a very large part of what is needed, making fewer and fewer things need to end up in configure scripts. I think most of what's left is checking for items (types, functions) existence and their shape, as you were doing :). I can dream about getting a nice special operator to check for fields/functions, would let us remove even more from configure time, but I suspect we won't because that requires type resolution and none of the existing special operators do that.

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mikepurvis 9 hours ago

You still need a configure step for the "where are my deps" part of it, though both autotools and CMake would be way faster if all they were doing was finding, and not any testing.