Is there a problem with cmake? Why are people still inventing new build systems?
Have you used CMake?? Remind me again how argument parsing works? How do I know if a variable is a list or not? What's that? Lists are strings? Everything is strings???
CMake is firmly in the "filenames don't contain spaces" era, along with make, Autotools etc. Granted it is more or less the standard at the moment but look at Meson to see how totally insane it is.
Is there a problem with cmake? Why are people still inventing new build systems?
cmake cons (IMHO): - the archaic custom scripting language (that's its main problem) - there are many ways to do the same thing, resulting in each (non-trivial) build script looking different - for the above reason, importing dependencies written by somebody else is non-trivial, and its often better to rewrite the cmake scripts completely - it lacks some 'integration features' found in more modern systems like Rust's…
Microsoft (both vscode and studio) seems to be moving toward ide adaptation — parsing output from other compilers, supporting compilation databases and folder-only (non solution) projects. Perhaps this, combined with Clang viability for MSVC ABI, will reduce the impetus for cross-platform projects to use cmake just to support Windows. Of course, there’s added inertia in favor of cmake due to LLVM, Boost, and others moving over. Not to mention that Microsoft now also supports the “cmake server” concept (there will be some deep irony if after 20 years of “we need cmake to support Microsoft” the argument for the next N years becomes “we should use cmake because Microsoft supports it”).