Using GNU autotools is not fun, but we still need a roughly similar tool.

• Even in the early days, running the configure generated by GNU autotools was slow. And it is still slow.

• The configure is slow, because it is checking things that was useful to check in the age before POSIX standardization, for example. But this is not essential anymore. So, we can make it simpler.

• Why to use a separate configuration language where a simple POSIX-compliant shell script will do?

• There is a certain amount of reusable code that is useful to copy from project to project. We don't wish to maintain all that in every project's version control. Version control should have only the pieces that are unique to that particular project.