![]() ![]() I will start the project on Windows using VS Code and the Visual Studio Build Tools, but if you wish, you can start with a different IDE, or even a different operating system. Just about any tool that can be downloaded from the internet, and which provides CMake files for building, can be used. I will show one example of this when I use Google Test in this project. ![]() With CMake, you can download, build, and use a large number of tools. You will see this when I port my project from Windows using the Visual Studio build tools to Linux using the gnu build tools. Aside from specifying the tools to use, no other changes are required to the CMake specification files. You can specify the build tools that you want to use for example, you can use MSVC or LLVM on Windows, and gnu or LLVM on Unix-like systems, including Linux, OSX, and MSYS or MinGW. Because it can be called from the command line, it integrates well with continuous integration/continuous build systems. It can even create make files if you want to do everything from the command line. Similar capabilities are available for every other popular IDE. For example, CMake can generate solution (.sln) and project files (.vcxproj) that Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code use on Windows. ![]() CMake then takes that information and generates the files needed to build the system. You specify what you want done, not how to do it. Why Use CMake?ĬMake is a powerful and robust build system. Most of the information is applicable to using almost any IDE, or indeed, no IDE at all. I will also use git and Google Test, and port the project from Windows to Linux. ** According to the documentation for CMake Version 3.9 & 3.15 & 3.In this article and several more, I will be discussing developing a very simple C++ library and application using CMake and Visual Studio Code. Also as mentioned above, there are configuration files that must be generated that depend on the source files supplied in the CMakeLists.txt file. Some source files may already exist, but CMake has the ability to generate header and source files. Why do the input files have to be written by the generator if they already exist? Generally, yes, but other build systems could be setup like Ninja. If I'm using Linux, what is my native build system by default? Make? With both systems there are additional files needed that CMake knows how to create given a proper CMakeLists.txt file. For Visual Studio you have a solution file (.sln). For a make build system you also have a MakeFile. If I have a set of C++ files in my project, are these the input files? These are generators that create a configuration to work with an alternative IDE tool and must be included with either an IDE or Command-Line generator. Examples are Visual Studio and Xcode which include a compiler natively. These generators are for Integrated Development Environments that include their own compiler. The chosen tool chain must be configured prior to generating the build system with CMake. These generators are for command-line build tools, like Make and Ninja. CMake allows you to specify which if these build systems to generate configuration files for.ĬMake includes a number of Command-Line, IDE, and Extra generators. Sometimes multiple build systems may be installed on a computer, like for Windows you could have a Visual Studio and MinGW build system. The build system uses those files to compile and link source code files.Ī build system is a broad term that groups together a set of tools used to generally compile and link source code, but it can also include auxiliary tools used during a build process.įor example, in a multi-stage build system, one executable might be built to be used in the build process of another build.ĭepending on the tool chain used on a system, CMake will generate multiple files and folders to allow the building of the source files referenced in the CMakeLists.txt and supporting. It used a generator to create configuration files for a build system. CMake doesn't compile or link any source files. To understand what a generator is, we need to first look at what is a build system.
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