Six months. Countless builds. And me, stuck in a loop-doing the same thing over and over with different buils systems—so you don’t have to. Let’s figure out which C++ build system is really worth your time. I put the most popular build systems to the test—CMake, Make, Meson, Bazel, and more. Some were great, and […]
Is Bazel a good alternative to CMake, or any of the other C/C++ build systems? My answer so far has been “don’t know because I’ve never tried Bazel.” Today, I’m going to change that, and put Bazel head-to-head against CMake.Here’s how it works: I’ve got two small projects, and I’m going to build them using […]
Yes, it’s finally done! The CMake Tutorial has taken me ages to complete, and a crazy amount of research. Now it’s finished, the “pre-release” label is gone, and its ready make you a CMake master starting now.What’s in The CMake Tutorial?So what’s in the tutorial? Everything you need to learn in order to go from […]
CMake, or Visual Studio projects? Which is easier? Which is better? Which should you use? Lets answer those questions by building some actual codeHere’s what I’m going to do: I’ll build the same code using both build systems And, I’ll try to get both build systems to do roughly the same thing, within reasonable limits […]
Which build system should you use: CMake? Or Ninja? That’s actually a rather weird question, but it’s a question that gets asked all the same. So let’s answer it…For a full answer, watch the video. In brief: Ninja is designed with one goal in mind: speed. To achieve maximum build speed, they’ve traded scriptability for speed. […]
The second to last chapter of The CMake Tutorial is done! It’s now 93% complete, and I have to say that it’s much bigger and more comprehensive than I originally planned (179 pages of sharp, no-fluff content).That’s because I wanted to cover everything a developer would need to go from zero CMake knowledge to being […]
The other day, a code review done by The Cherno caught my attention. The code’s author was a self-taught programmer who asked him to review and roast his code. And roast it he did. Actually, he roasted the build system because attempting to build the code took so much time that he never got round […]
ERROR Another chapter of The CMake Tutorial is done, making it roughly 87% complete. This is the first chapter in part V, which covers building larger projects. I’ve also added a small section to Chapter 6 on how you can use pre-installed dependencies, yet still use an in-repo source-code copy as backup (plus some warnings […]
Meson, Meson, what about Meson? Meson has been the most requested build system for me to compare. For those who don’t know, Meson is one of the newest kids on the build system block. From their website, it’s meant to be “both extremely fast, and even more importantly, as user friendly as possible.” So their […]
Alright, it’s time to compare CMake and Make again, but with code that uses a third-party library. Why? Because almost anything interesting or useful is going to use third-party libraries.A quick reminder of the rules: I’ll build the same code using both build systems And, I’ll try to get both build systems to do roughly […]
