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Comment by Surac | Hacker News Reader

Uses CMAKE, Sorry not for me. Call me old but i prefere good old make or batch. Maybe it's because i can understand those tools. Debugging CMAKE build problems made me hate it. Also i code for embedded CPU and most of the time CMAKE is just overkill and does not play well the compiler/binutils provided. The Platform independency is just not happening in those environments.

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When you need a configuration step, cmake will actually save you a lot of time, especially if you work cross platform or even cross compile. I love to hate cmake as much as the next guy, and it would be hard to design a worse scripting language, but I'll take it any time over autoconf. Some of the newer tools may well be more convenient - I tried Bazel, and it sure wasn't (for me).

If you're happy to bake one config in a makefile, then cmake will do very little for you.

> most of the time CMAKE is just overkill and does not play well the compiler/binutils provided

You need to define a CMake toolchain[1] and pass it to CMake with --toolchain /path/to/file in the command-line, or in a preset file with the key `toolchainFile` in a CMake preset. I've compiled for QNX and ARM32 boards with CMake, no issues, but this needs to be done.

[1]: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/manual/cmake-toolchains....

For toy projects good old Make is fine...but at some point a project gets large enough that you need something more powerful. If you need something that can deal with multiple layers of nested sub-repositories, third-party and first-party dependencies, remote and local projects, multiple build configurations, dealing with non-code assets like documentation, etc, etc, etc - Make just isn't enough.

For simple projects. Make is easier for simple things I will grant. However when your projects gets complex at all make becomes a real pain and cmake becomes much easier.

Cmake has a lot of warts, but they have also put a lot of effort into finding and fixing all those weird special cases. If your project uses CMake odds are high it will build anywhere.

Odds are high the distro maintainer will lose hair trying to package it

Also, for better or worse, cmake is pretty much the "standard" for C/C++ these days.

Fighting the standard often creates it's own set of problems and nightmares that just aren't worth it. Especially true in C++ where yhou often have to integrate with other projects and their build systems. Way easier if you just use cmake like everyone else.

Even the old hold outs, boost and google open source, now use cmake for their open source stuff.

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