I can see that this works, but I do wonder why we have to do this when other build systems such as automake (and indeed most hand-rolled) Makefiles's don't provide this and assume the user can include ccache in the CC/CXX variable itself.

I'm fine with that too. I just assumed that the motivation for quoting WASM_CC was to allow for spaces in which case this would be the only way to do that.

I'm fine with that too. I just assumed that the motivation for quoting WASM_CC was to allow for spaces in which case this would be the only way to do that.

I think we can just get rid of the quotes then perhaps.

Looking at autoconf/automake it looks like spaces are OK in the CC variable.

When I run CC="ccache /usr/bin/gcc" ./configure the generated Makefile contains CC = ccache /usr/bin/gcc and it seems to work just fine.

Actually checked with and actual space in the path to gcc and autoconf fails. Apparently its just not supported: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16194124/autoconf-spaces-in-path.

I'm not sure we need to go out of our way to support spaces in the paths given than autoconf doesn't.

Done. I had to tweak WASM_NM/WASM_AR so that they ignored ccache because they're invoked with quotes. This works if ccache/sccache is invoked existing on the PATH. If the caller is providing an absolute path to some kind of wrapper, they'll have to explicitly override WASM_NM/WASM_AR.

Is there anything else that needs to be done here to merge?