Starting with VS2017, Visual Studio comes bundled with Modern CMake (and Incredibuild is bundled inside Visual Studio). Using CMake which generates the correct Visual Studio project/solution is Godsend. Maintaining multiple branches with different versions of the product compiled with different versions of Visual Studio is nothing short of a nightmare. It is not uncommon to see a branch being maintained that compiles only in Visual Studio 2010 to provide the customers with a migration path to later versions of the product. In long-running projects maintaining the sanity of visual studio projects and solutions is a pain, to put it mildly. The CMake storm was twenty years in the making! Now that it has reached the plateau of productivity and the hype cycle has ended, let us see some of the success stories and why you should take modern CMake seriously. From Visual Studio 2017 to Qt 6.0 now deciding to support CMake, I believe, CMake currently has reached its plateau of productivity. Modern CMake (Versions after CMake 3.0) dropped many anti-patterns of classic CMake and has been riding on the Slope of Enlightenment. It then took a painstaking wait of around ten years to release CMake 3.0 during which CMake – I would claim – went through the trough of disillusionment. This came as a major triumph for CMake and – as it seems – to be the peak of Inflated expectations. In 2006, KDE successfully migrated to CMake leaving behind their aging autotools build system. Within the next five years, CMake was well recognized as a viable solution to build large open-source and proprietary projects alike. The initial version was released by Kitware in the year 2000. Image source: Gartner (I’ve added the years to the original image) There is no direct support for more sophisticated features - in other words: switching between configurations won't give you what you might expect.Without much ado, let us start with the standard Gartner hype cycle framework and overlay the stages CMake went through in it. As it stands, you have to generate two directories with projects/solutions - one for each build type (debug, release, etc.). One more important thing to know about is the lack of support ( afaik) for "Solution Configurations" in CMake.
#Cmake visual studio code
He checks if the code can be built in the recreated environment.Īt first we were a little afraid of how it will turn out, but the workflow works really well and with nice diff visible before each commit, everyone can easily see if his changes were correctly mapped in.When he's done, he run a script that "refreshes" the respective.Programmer adds/deletes files remembering to work on the defined /src directory, not the default project's one.All source files go to /src and files visible in Visual Studio are just "links" to them defined in.As it is now, we are dealing with it as follows:
![cmake visual studio cmake visual studio](https://httpsimg.dsx2020.com/Snipaste_2021-04-27_11-03-30.png)
slns, but there is always the problem with the need to modify the.
![cmake visual studio cmake visual studio](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2019/11/cmake_tools.png)
Remember that if you're doing out-of-source builds, you need to be careful not to create the source file in the build directory (since Visual Studio only knows about the build directory).ĬMake can generate really nice Visual Studio. Create the file, make sure it is in the correct place.ĬMake 2.6 automatically reruns itself if any CMakeLists.txt files have changed (and (semi-)automatically reloads the solution/projects).
![cmake visual studio cmake visual studio](https://www.bookset.io/uploads/projects/CMake-Cookbook/images/chapter13/13-4.png)
The concrete workflow for adding a new file to a project is really simple: We're very happy since we don't have to deal with project files anymore. We also had some complaints about CMake not being fully integrated into the Visual Studio project/solution manager, so files had to be added manually to CMakeLists.txt this was a major break in the workflow people were used to.īut in general, it was a quite smooth transition. We moved our department's build chain to CMake, and we had a few internal roadbumps since other departments where using our project files and where accustomed to just importing them into their solutions.