|
CMake
29 Jan 2004
Despite my current monogamous relationship with C#, I've spent most of my
career writing code which really needed to be cross-platform. I've come to
understand how very hard it is to create any non-trivial body of code that runs
on multiple platforms, and I have a great deal of admiration for solutions that
actually work well.
One of the toughest parts of cross-platform development is the build
system. No matter how clean and portable your C code is, getting the tree
to build on multiple platforms is a whole different problem.
One solution I have used in the past is to do a completely Unix-centric build
system with bash and make, using cygwin to
run it under Windows. This works very well, except that it really annoys
the folks who prefer Visual Studio project files. (I've had people assert
that my tendency to run emacs on Windows is proof that my parents were brother
and sister.)
Personally, I have always believed that build management was by far the
weakest part of the Visual Studio environment. MSBuild looks like a step
in the right direction. VS.NET is actually pretty decent. (The build
system for Vault is done entirely in a VS.NET .sln file, and it's quite
complicated.) Previous Visual Studio releases simply didn't have the power
to do custom builds of larger projects, and the result wasn't cross-platform
anyway.
This week I discovered a nifty tool I had never seen before. It's
called CMake, and it's the build system used
for Kitware's Visualization Toolkit.
I've seen lots of alternatives to 'make', but this tool is surprisingly
different and deeply neato.
I started by downloading the VTK tarball on a MacOS X system, which from my
point of view is Unix with a nice UI. I ran CMake and edited the
configuration settings without much difficulty. But then, instead of
performing the build, CMake generated a regular Unix makefile. I typed
'make' and the entire tree was built with no problems. I was impressed
with the fact that CMake was not replacing my standard toolset, but I didn't
really appreciate this tool until I repeated the build on Windows.
I downloaded the exact same tarball to my Windows machine. I ran CMake
and once again edited the configuration settings. When I told CMake to
proceed, it generated a complete set of Visual Studio .NET 2003 project and
solution files. I opened the .sln and built the entire tree with no
problems.
I didn't go further, but I saw indications that CMake can generate output for
other build systems as well, including CodeWarrior on the Mac, and presumably
others.
Very, very cool. If I ever end up working on a cross-platform
project again, I will be inclined to use CMake.
| 