Comment by duped
9 hours ago
FWIW: there is something fundamentally wrong with a meta-meta build system. I don't think you should bother generating or wrapping CMake, you should be replacing it.
9 hours ago
FWIW: there is something fundamentally wrong with a meta-meta build system. I don't think you should bother generating or wrapping CMake, you should be replacing it.
Cmake is doing a lot of underappreciated work under the hood that would be very hard to replicate in another tool, tons of accumulated workarounds for all the different host operating systems, compiler toolchains and IDEs, it's also one of few build tools which properly support Windows and Visual Studio.
Just alone reverse engineering the Xcode and Visual Studio project file formats for each IDE version isn't fun, but this "boring" grunt work is what makes cmake so valuable.
The core ideas of cmake are sound, it's only the scripting language that sucks.
Another fresh example of what you don't like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExSlx0vBMXo Building C++: It Doesn't Have to be Painful! - Nicole Mazzuca - Meeting C++ 2025
Build systems don't plan to converge in the future =)
My thoughts exactly. I thought this was going to be some new thing, but it's just yet another reason that I'll stick with Makefiles.
Do your Makefiles work across Linux, macOS and Windows (without WSL or MingW), GCC, Clang and MSVC, or allow loading the project into an IDE like Xcode or Visual Studio though? That's why meta-build-systems like cmake were created, not to be a better GNU Make.
There is something fundamentally wrong with Windows or Visual Studio that it requires ugly solutions.
3 replies →