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First, why is it the worst of all worlds? I have a consistently good experience using CMake-generated Visual Studio projects. Second, what's the alternative? Ha

• catiopatio 4y ago
  VS seems to be the most usable of CMake’s IDE output formats, but it still remains an awkward experience: 1) Two editable sources of truth, one of which is only sometimes overwritten when performing a target build, depending on whether the CMake inputs have changed. 2) Non-universal native IDE constructs can only be expressed if CMake supports them, and if you use IDE-specific CMake features. VS is as good as it gets, and it isn’t that great. By comparison, Xcode project support is absolutely terrible. CMake has a semi-declarative semantic representation of your project and its targets, but has to lossily translate that into a number of different, incompatible project formats, all of which are only capable of representing a different incompatible subset of CMake’s features. In several cases, CMake’s features behave differently (or not at all) depending on the generator being used. I think GP already thoroughly elucidated most of the issues with this model; all of these issues fall out of the necessarily lossy, inconsistent conversion to incompatible output formats.