The Choice of Language

Your choice of programming language is another important factor to consider when deciding whether to use the Autotools. Remember that the Autotools were designed by GNU people to manage GNU projects. In the GNU community, there are two factors that determine the importance of a computer programming language:

  • Are there any GNU packages written in the language?

  • Does the GNU compiler toolset support the language?

Autoconf provides native support for the following languages based on these two criteria (by native support, I mean that Autoconf will compile, link, and run source-level feature checks in these languages):

  • C

  • C++

  • Objective C

  • Fortran

  • Fortran 77

  • Erlang

Therefore, if you want to build a Java package, you can configure Automake ...

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