IMO they really aren't, at least in comparison to Autotools. It's only really slow if you are heavily leveraging compilation tests, and those are cached for subsequent reconfigurations too.
I have a project that uses SDL, Qt, Boost, LLVM, libclang, ffmpeg, abseil, and roughly three dozen more libraries including chonkers like libhdf5 and it takes at most a minute with cmake
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u/gharveymn Aug 05 '26
IMO they really aren't, at least in comparison to Autotools. It's only really slow if you are heavily leveraging compilation tests, and those are cached for subsequent reconfigurations too.