I've built and maintained a generator for one of those vendor-specific eclipse IDEs. It was an absolute nightmare I don't recommend to anyone, but not for any o

I've built and maintained a generator for one of those vendor-specific eclipse IDEs. It was an absolute nightmare I don't recommend to anyone, but not for any of the reasons you'd imagine. CMake itself is easy to build / read. Implement a few functions and you'll quickly have something workable. The issues came from elsewhere: * None of the graphical CMake tools allow you to select the CMake binary, so you'd get users using the wrong binary and not seeing the generator mentioned in docs. * When things break elsewhere, it's "your responsibility" to fix it in the generator. People put meaningless, nonsensical junk in their CMake files and expect it to output something that builds. Doesn't matter that the build script or the IDE are fundamentally broken, people just want the output so they can get back to their work. They don't want to yak shave. * Vendor tooling code quality is somehow even worse than the actual product they provide. Dropping every 4096th character from stdin? Why not? Not generating debug info for files with uppercase letters in the filename? Sure. I won't name names, but they're a billion dollar EDA vendor whose initials are MG. Avoid CMake generators like the plague unless you want to spend the next bit of your life debugging your vendor tools and supporting every workflow quirk your coworkers have.