Building C++ on both Windows and Linux

c++ build-process cross-platform cmake scons
dimba picture dimba · Jul 10, 2009 · Viewed 7.7k times · Source

I'm involved in C++ project targeted for Windows and Linux (RHEL) platforms. Till now the development was purely done on Visual Studio 2008. For Linux compilation we used 3rd party Visual Studio plugin, which read VS solution/perojects files and remotely compiled on Linux machine.

Recently the decision was to abandon the 3rd party plugin.

Now my big concern is a build system. I was looking around for cross platform build tools. This way I don't need to maintain two set of build files (e.g. vcproj/solution for Windows and make files for Linux).

I found the following candidates: a. Scons b. cmake

What do you think about the tools for cross-platfrom development?

Yet another point that bothers me is that Visual Studio (+ Visual Assist) will loose a lot functionality without vcproj files - how you handle the issue with the tools?

Thanks Dima

PS 1: Something that I like about Scons is that it (a) uses python and hence it's flexible, while cmake uses propriety language (I understand that it's not a winner feature for a build-system) (b) self contained (no need to generate makefiles on Linux as with cmake).

So why not Scons? Why in your projects the decision was to use cmake?

Answer

haffax picture haffax · Jul 10, 2009

CMake will allow you to still use Visual Studio solutions and project files. Cmake doesn't build the source code itself, rather it generated build-files for you. For Linux this can be Code::Blocks, KDevelop or plain makefiles or still other more esoteric choices . For Windows it can be among others Visual Studio project files and still others for MacOS. So Visual Studio solutions and projects are created from your CMakeLists.txt. This works for big projects just fine. E.g. current Ogre3d uses CMake for all platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOS and IPhone) and it works really well.

I don't know much about scons in that regard though, I only used to build one library and only in Linux. So I can't compare these two on fair ground. But for our multi-platform projects CMake is strong enough.

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