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The meaningful difference for me is that I work in a place where most of the developers love their IDEs. CMake is literally the only cross platform build system

The meaningful difference for me is that I work in a place where most of the developers love their IDEs. CMake is literally the only cross platform build system with first class IDE support on both Windows and Linux. If you use VS Code on macOS, you get it there as well.

jhasse 6y ago
> If you use VS Code on macOS, you get it there as well. CMake can generate Xcode projects.
- Teknoman117 6y ago
  Right, what I meant by developers who love their IDEs is that they complain if they see a console. They just want to open an IDE and click "open folder" or "open project", so not having to use an intermediate IDE project generator is a massive boon.
ajconway 6y ago
CMake does very good when you have a C/C++ project, but it very poorly suited for cross-language dependencies. Blaze-like build systems, on the other hand, were built specifically for that.
JamesSwift 6y ago
After digging into Bazel a bit recently, I really hope they invest significant energy into the IDE story next. That is a huge, gaping hole that is being not-really solved in all the language/IDE ecosystems and is a _massive_ roadblock to adoption. IDE integration would remove 90% of my hesitation to push it at my company.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  It’s not much work. Internally at Google they have Idea integration. The challenge for open sourcing it may be that the plugin is also responsible for Google3 integration if I recall correctly.
  - JamesSwift 6y ago
    "not much work" is absolutely not the feeling I have about it based on some conference talks about the topic (e.g. the various xcode talks, or the Wix talks on intelliJ), and my own thought experiments on getting it tied into Visual Studio / Visual Studio for Mac. I think the Bazel team introduced Aspects and punted the rest for a later date. Now they hope each language/IDE community will take that infrastructure and build out the rest of the ecosystem. I think its too important of a piece of the puzzle to leave to the community.
- Teknoman117 6y ago
  I really like Bazel as well. As you said, cross language dependency management in CMake is hilariously annoying. However, I'm at practically a C++ only shop so it rarely comes up. Where I am we were using CMake 2 for our build system for a long time and it got into bad shape. When we made the decision to rewrite the build system (across a few dozen subprojects), we looked at a few - Meson, Bazel, CMake, etc. CMake was hard to argue against because of the recent work (last few years) by Microsoft to support CMake projects directly (File -> Open Folder). We wanted to try to get away from maintaining separate IDE projects for every platform for every project.

jhasse 6y ago

> If you use VS Code on macOS, you get it there as well. CMake can generate Xcode projects.

Teknoman117 6y ago
Right, what I meant by developers who love their IDEs is that they complain if they see a console. They just want to open an IDE and click "open folder" or "open project", so not having to use an intermediate IDE project generator is a massive boon.

ajconway 6y ago

CMake does very good when you have a C/C++ project, but it very poorly suited for cross-language dependencies. Blaze-like build systems, on the other hand, were built specifically for that.

JamesSwift 6y ago

After digging into Bazel a bit recently, I really hope they invest significant energy into the IDE story next. That is a huge, gaping hole that is being not-really solved in all the language/IDE ecosystems and is a _massive_ roadblock to adoption. IDE integration would remove 90% of my hesitation to push it at my company.

vlovich123 6y ago
It’s not much work. Internally at Google they have Idea integration. The challenge for open sourcing it may be that the plugin is also responsible for Google3 integration if I recall correctly.
- JamesSwift 6y ago
  "not much work" is absolutely not the feeling I have about it based on some conference talks about the topic (e.g. the various xcode talks, or the Wix talks on intelliJ), and my own thought experiments on getting it tied into Visual Studio / Visual Studio for Mac. I think the Bazel team introduced Aspects and punted the rest for a later date. Now they hope each language/IDE community will take that infrastructure and build out the rest of the ecosystem. I think its too important of a piece of the puzzle to leave to the community.
Teknoman117 6y ago
I really like Bazel as well. As you said, cross language dependency management in CMake is hilariously annoying. However, I'm at practically a C++ only shop so it rarely comes up. Where I am we were using CMake 2 for our build system for a long time and it got into bad shape. When we made the decision to rewrite the build system (across a few dozen subprojects), we looked at a few - Meson, Bazel, CMake, etc. CMake was hard to argue against because of the recent work (last few years) by Microsoft to support CMake projects directly (File -> Open Folder). We wanted to try to get away from maintaining separate IDE projects for every platform for every project.