Qt Creator Gets Excited For CMake Server-Mode

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Qt Creator Gets Excited For CMake Server-Mode

With last week's CMake 3.7 release one of the less-advertised features is the build system's server-mode functionality, which is sure to excited integrated development environments (IDEs)...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qt-Creator-CMake-Server-Mode

[eydee]

Qt Creator Gets Excited For CMake Server-Mode

Does it have an AI now? How can software get excited?

[ddriver]

Does it have an AI now? How can software get excited?

He probably means that's making him excited, which is quite frankly TMI...

[gufide]

As anyone as the feel that CMake badly need a better replacement?

[mcirsta]

As anyone as the feel that CMake badly need a better replacement?

Not me. I actually really like cmake very much. But I suppose you can try qbs, scons or the chromium build system. Plenty of build systems that almost no one uses and then there's cmake that's actually used by very many project ... I wonder why

[gufide]

Not me. I actually really like cmake very much. But I suppose you can try qbs, scons or the chromium build system. Plenty of build systems that almost no one uses and then there's cmake that's actually used by very many project ... I wonder why

I use CMake too. I once heard "CMake is shit but it's the best we got". I tend to relate a lot to this quote.

[rleigh]

I use CMake too. I once heard "CMake is shit but it's the best we got". I tend to relate a lot to this quote.

Pretty much this. It's not the nicest language, and it has its rough edges, but it's miles better than the competition. There's nothing that comes close in terms of features, functionality and multi-platform support. After using and contributing to the GNU Autotools for over 15 years, all my free software projects now use CMake, all my work projects use CMake, and I've converted a bunch of common packages from Autotools to CMake over the last couple of years. It's a huge improvement, and is much simpler for people to maintain.

There are lots of alternatives. But they all fall short. It's easy to make a build system that does the basics--compiling, linking, installing, running unit tests. Having a comprehensive set of feature tests, portabiility to pretty much every operating system, compiler, IDE, build tool and language, plus piles of modules for integrating with tons of additional tools, libraries and packages, is something very few do, and none to the same extent as CMake. It's also really easy to create new modules and get them added to cmake. The autotools never got that amount of activity due to (1) copyright assignment to the FSF and (2) walling off user-contributed extension as a separate project. It meant that autoconf lacks tons of needed macros which work straight off with CMake. Like portably enabling threading. It's even worse with scons, where I had to basically rewrite ACX_PTHREAD in python. The autotools solved the portability problems of multiple unix systems in the 1990s. CMake solves the portability problems we have today.

[nslay]

... There's nothing that comes close in terms of features, functionality and multi-platform support ...

To my knowledge, there's nothing that supports multiple IDEs. It's really nice to support decades of different versions of Visual Studio. And even then, it supports a lot of stuff I've never seen like several versions of Borland IDEs. And let's not forget all the misc. functionality in CMake to influence how the IDE displays the project and files. There's just nothing that does that at all.

[cen1]

Thumbs up for CMake from me too. I converted all my C++ projects to CMake and never looked back. There is simply no better alternative for cross-platform projects, period. It takes some time to get used to it and understand some "hacks" and undocumented features but once it works it just works. Did I mention I can make rpm and deb packages with a single command thanks to CPack? Beat that! I am considering to write a pkgng CPack extension in the future to cover the FreeBSD world too.

[RealNC]

As anyone as the feel that CMake badly need a better replacement?

Some people do. There's GENie:

https://github.com/bkaradzic/GENie

Which exists because the people behind it find CMake too difficult to learn and too difficult to initially set up a project with. It uses Lua.

Personally, I think CMake is OK, even though I agree that it can initially steal your time and instead of working on your project, you work on setting up the build system.