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CMake - Get your build on!.md

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Notes from the Video

What is a build system?

  • Orchestrates building your project.
  • Should be efficient, only build the project that has been modified and not the whole system.
  • Can also try to detect properties of the target system and customize your programs accordingly.
  • Can build your project based on a flag to turn on/off portions of your build.
  • Can also orchestrate testing of your project.

Why should we use?

  • Build your project asap.
  • Project to be portable.
  • Writing build system is tedious as your project sieze grows

Existing Build System

  • Handwritten makefiles

    • targets and build rules.
    • good for small project but tedious when the project size grows.
    • No native windows support
    • Not meant for configuration detection.
    • builds only specified part of the project that has been modified.

  • Hand written Makefiles + Configure

    • Configure is a shell script used to detect properties of the target system. enable/disable features based on the system configuration(like compilers features, language support, hardware specs)
    • Hard to maintain.
    • There is a solution to the problem.
    • recursive makefiles are slow because they create a lot of make processes to parse each makefile.

  • Autotools

    • Made up of a selection of tools(e.g. autoconf, automake, autoheader, ...)
    • Autoconf uses M4 macros to generate configure scripts.
    • Automake uses M4 macros to generate makefiles.
    • uses bash shell, M4 macros, perl...
    • No native Windows support.
    • Used by GNU projects.

  • SCons

    • Uses to python to build project
    • Native windows support.

  • Ninja

    • Similar to make.
    • It is make done right and has only targets and their rules and nothing else.
    • Non recursive, so it is fast.
    • Cross platform.

Cmake

  • It is a meta-build system
  • It can be used to generate other build systems.
  • Cross platform.
  • Project Description(CMakeLists.txt) --> CMake --> othre build systems
  • Other build systems include
    • Makefile project.
    • Eclipse project.
    • XCode project.
    • Ninja project.
    • Visual studio projects.
    • Other build system can be integrated using extensions.

Who uses CMake?

  • VTK / ITK library(original users of CMake).
  • LLVM/Clang compiler framework.
  • KDE desktop.
  • MySQL(and its famous fork MariaDB).
  • OpenCV library.
  • Blender
  • and many other.

Ways of Invoking CMake

  • CMake Command line tool
  • ccmake Command line User Interface using ncurses.
  • cmake-gui

Building out of source

  • This means having all generated binaries in a different folder from the source folder.
  • Easy build for multiple configurations.
  • Easy to clean builds
  • CMake supports this out of the box.