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dupedtoday at 4:31 PM3 repliesview on HN

FWIW: there is something fundamentally wrong with a meta-meta build system. I don't think you should bother generating or wrapping CMake, you should be replacing it.


Replies

flohofwoetoday at 4:54 PM

Cmake is doing a lot of underappreciated work under the hood that would be very hard to replicate in another tool, tons of accumulated workarounds for all the different host operating systems, compiler toolchains and IDEs, it's also one of few build tools which properly support Windows and Visual Studio.

Just alone reverse engineering the Xcode and Visual Studio project file formats for each IDE version isn't fun, but this "boring" grunt work is what makes cmake so valuable.

The core ideas of cmake are sound, it's only the scripting language that sucks.

SleepyMyroslavtoday at 5:28 PM

Another fresh example of what you don't like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExSlx0vBMXo Building C++: It Doesn't Have to be Painful! - Nicole Mazzuca - Meeting C++ 2025

Build systems don't plan to converge in the future =)

SpaceNoodledtoday at 4:50 PM

My thoughts exactly. I thought this was going to be some new thing, but it's just yet another reason that I'll stick with Makefiles.

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