Hi, just a quick question, but I was looking at automating my compiling process and have been using make (with a makefile) to do so. However, I saw cmake and was wondering whether it is easier to learn and/or is more organized? If someone had experience with the 2, what would you recommend?
Thanks.
CMake isn't a build tool in itself, it's a meta-build tool.
You can use a CMake file to generate a makefile for you, which you then use to build your project, or you can use the CMake file to make a project for an IDE like Microsoft Visual Studio, etc...
I use it so that I don't have to manually manage my Visual Studio project files, and so that when I port to linux I can also generate makefiles.
CMake or Premake4 would be my suggestions. I find Premake is a little nicer to work with. But CMake has better support for library location auto-discovery. They both can generate makefiles or Visual Studio projects,(or xcode and codeblocks iirc). The benifits of choosing one of these project generator tools is that they automate some of the process of binding libraries and whatnot in order to avoid some of the platform dependent changes you'd need to run on windows/linux. Both also really narrow down the scope of what it takes to describe your project, where raw makefiles can get rather verbose rather quickly.
Oh, sorry for my misunderstanding! I thought they were the same :S
Anyways, thanks for the help! I'll definitely try out CMake and get the Makefiles automated then. :)
I need some help learning CMake, I've read the documentation and the tutorial that they've officially gave out to use, but it's all very confusing. Is there any good alternatives to it?
Thanks.
