3 ms·

I disagree with this. I don't find CMake any less easy to use than make in the simple case, but it is far better than Autotools in the complex case. Just learn

by krapht 12y ago

I disagree with this. I don't find CMake any less easy to use than make in the simple case, but it is far better than Autotools in the complex case. Just learn CMake and be done with it. As a bonus, it saves you some typing making your program cross-platform, although that is a pain no matter what tool you're using.

exDM69 12y ago
CMake works really well when you are building a normal user space application with only popular libraries (or ones that use CMake themselves) as dependencies that CMake can find and configure. Some CMake generators are better than others (e.g. ninja-build is really nice with CMake). Creating MSVC Project files was badly broken the last time I tried and even when it worked, the resulting project files are awkward for MSVC IDE users (I prefer nmake makefiles if compiling on Windows with MSVC). CMake falls apart when you try to do something more complicated, e.g. building a bootable kernel image which requires special handling for compiling and/or linking. I have done a bare metal project using CMake and GNU Make and the latter was a lot easier. To name a few other platforms where using GNU Make works better: Android NDK (default Android.mk build system is GNU Make, there are CMake-based hacks for Android but they were atrocious) and doing micro controller work like Arduino (when writing C, not using the Arduino language). To give an example where CMake works a lot better than GNU Make is cross compiling, e.g. building Windows binaries on a Linux host. All it takes is a few lines of "toolchain specs" and apt-getting the mingw toolchain. But even this falls apart when you need to build both, "host" and "target" binaries like you often need with hardware projects. CMake is by no means perfect and GNU Make is still a very useful tool to know.

3 ms·

I disagree with this. I don't find CMake any less easy to use than make in the simple case, but it is far better than Autotools in the complex case. Just learn

by krapht 12y ago

exDM69 12y ago
CMake works really well when you are building a normal user space application with only popular libraries (or ones that use CMake themselves) as dependencies that CMake can find and configure. Some CMake generators are better than others (e.g. ninja-build is really nice with CMake). Creating MSVC Project files was badly broken the last time I tried and even when it worked, the resulting project files are awkward for MSVC IDE users (I prefer nmake makefiles if compiling on Windows with MSVC). CMake falls apart when you try to do something more complicated, e.g. building a bootable kernel image which requires special handling for compiling and/or linking. I have done a bare metal project using CMake and GNU Make and the latter was a lot easier. To name a few other platforms where using GNU Make works better: Android NDK (default Android.mk build system is GNU Make, there are CMake-based hacks for Android but they were atrocious) and doing micro controller work like Arduino (when writing C, not using the Arduino language). To give an example where CMake works a lot better than GNU Make is cross compiling, e.g. building Windows binaries on a Linux host. All it takes is a few lines of "toolchain specs" and apt-getting the mingw toolchain. But even this falls apart when you need to build both, "host" and "target" binaries like you often need with hardware projects. CMake is by no means perfect and GNU Make is still a very useful tool to know.