4 ms·

then what's the point of cmake? won't legacy gnu make suffice? nothing is perfect including Make, but it seems gnu Make can put all its doc into one html manual

• ska 7y ago
  cross platform mostly works.
• ridiculous_fish 7y ago
  Writing Makefiles by hand is great for small projects. But make becomes unmanageable for large projects, and is bad at dealing with system and compiler differences.
  • einpoklum 7y ago
    It is not "great" for small projects, because: 1. Small projects also have dependencies 2. Small projects need to be build on multiple platforms too 3. It is more verbose, and at the same time more obscure, than writing a CMakeLists.txt (typically).
• einpoklum 7y ago
  CMake is not a replacement for Make; it generates Makefiles for you (or ninja files, or whatever-Microsoft-uses files). In that sense it's like a more modern and less crufty GNU autotools which can have different kinds of output build systems.