Great that there are performance benefits, but one thing that I think both meson/ninja and cmake (or cmake/ninja) got wrong, and GNU configure got right is "./configure --help". Why do neither of these tools simply add --help here? Yes, their syntax is different, but the issue is not only about --help. Often I could disable documentation or man page via --disable-man or --disable-doc or something like that. I recently had a discussion with a guy who transitioned into ninja, and I reasoned that there should be an option to skip installing man-pages. He thinks everyone needs manpages. I told him I never look at any local man page ever; I only look online for help. And have been doing so for almost 30 years. I understand the 1970s era of man-pages, but I have no use for them (I do gather local documentation, just not via manpages). He did not want to add a way to install his software without having available xmlto, docbook variants (which are a pain to install, just look at the LFS/BLFS instructions and even then they do not work cleanly). Meson and cmake are better than the GNU autotools, but the few things GNU autotools got right, were lost in both meson and cmake, which is interesting. It seems we can only select between different trade-offs here. New is not automatically better. And being 5% faster really is pointless if functionality is removed or not available anymore.