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Comment by dzorz | Hacker News Reader

Is there a recent comparison of cmake, scons and (boost) jam? I personally use cmake and it does its job well, but it has some flaws that aren't being fixed for some time...

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The KDE project evaluated CMake and Scons (actually ported everything to Scons first), but ended up going for CMake. There's an article on it here:

http://lwn.net/Articles/188693/

I find QMake, even for projects that don't use Qt, really nice for projects that don't need to be packaged up or have complex dependancies. The format is trivial and it does well with generating makefiles, XCode projects or Visual Studio projects.

I would also like to see an informed comparison. In addition to cmake, scons, qmake, and boost, there is also omake, which has an OCaml background but supports C, and waf, another Python build system. After skimming some documentation, I found it harder to compare autotools replacements than to compare various web frameworks. :)

It depends a lot on your project. For large C++ projects, I've found scons and boost jam painfully slow for iterative builds. For smaller things they're possibly nice because they're expressive and pretty simple.

AFAIK, either make or vanilla jam is the fastest for C++, which is by far the most important thing to me, but that'll vary depending on your particular situation.

This is a bit old, but still accurate: http://www.gamesfromwithin.com/articles/0509/000100.html

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