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Comment by DagAgren | Hacker News Reader

The only reason CMake is considered better than automake is because automake is so unimaginably dreadful. CMake is a lot worse than pretty much any competent piece of software.

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Yet CMake is much better and comes with support for installers (Deb/rpm/MSI/DMG), which is a killer feature.

And now it's even better to couple it with Conan for dependency management

Ignoring the qt part entirely, I think qmake is the best of the bunch.

Qt is moving to CMake too. And the latest versions of CMake are as good, or better, than qmake. Add to that vcpkg and you will have a fantastic solution for managing dependencies.

Maybe CMake is not the best but is good enough and the new standard in the C++ world.

It’s really not good enough, it’s ok to admit it. Nobody likes CMake, it just somehow won the makefile generator wars. Having to a learn shitty, esoteric language to compile my code Is not something that makes me more productive.

> Having to a learn shitty, esoteric language to compile my code Is not something that makes me more productive.

You say that but frankly between CMake code and Ant or msbuild ...

Qmake. It’s simple, it’s cross-platform, it gets out of my way.

it's also going the way of the dodo as Qt 6 is migrating to CMake :p

5 will get forked because of the way 6 is being licensed.

6 will be licensed like 5 : https://www.embeddeduse.com/2019/12/21/safe-guarding-the-lgp...

I agree. qmake was much, much better to work with than cmake. I tend to believe the reason cmake won is because qmake was so associated with Qt. The best tech does not always win.

Android also settled with cmake, while keeping the original ndk-build makefile based one, after doing a couple of failed attempts to switch to something else.

After 10 years they are finally introducing AAR support for NDK projects, which is also built on top of cmake.

qmake is has very poor handling of dependencies between generate header files, like those used with protobuf.

https://github.com/jmesmon/qmake-protobuf-example

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