Is Autotools obsolete?

Autotools has been obsolete since when commercial Unix has become obsolete. And the advent of multi-core CPUs has made autotools even more obsolete.

Can I use CMake instead of make?

cmake is a system to generate make files based on the platform (i.e. CMake is cross platform) which you can then make using the generated makefiles. While make is you directly writing Makefile for a specific platform that you are working with. If your product is crossplatform, then cmake is a better choice over make .

Is CMake any good?

CMake introduces a lot of complexity into the build system, most of which only pays off if you use it for building complex software projects. The good news is that CMake does a good job of keeping a lot of this messiness away from you: Use out-of-source builds and you don’t even have to look at the generated files.

Why use CMake?

CMake can generate a native build environment that will compile source code, create libraries, generate wrappers and build executables in arbitrary combinations. CMake supports in-place and out-of-place builds, and can therefore support multiple builds from a single source tree.

Are makefiles bad?

Despite its popularity, make is a deeply flawed tool. Its reliability is suspect; its performance is poor, especially for large projects; and its makefile language is arcane and lacks basic language features that we take for granted in other programming languages. Admittedly, make is not the only automated build tool.

Where is Vcpkg installed?

It is recommended to clone vcpkg as a submodule for CMake projects, but to install it globally for MSBuild projects. If installing globally, we recommend a short install path like: C:\src\vcpkg or C:\dev\vcpkg, since otherwise you may run into path issues for some port build systems.

Is CMake widely used?

Our brief research showed that CMake and ‘make’ were the most popular cross-platform tools, having ~30\% of users each, while both Autotools and qmake had less than 7\% of users.

Is CMake free for commercial use?

In software development, CMake is cross-platform free and open-source software for build automation, testing, packaging and installation of software by using a compiler-independent method. CMake is distributed as open-source software under permissive New BSD license.

Why recursive make is considered harmful?

Recursive Make is considered harmful for very good reasons (Miller 1998); it is not possible to accurately track dependencies when the build system is con- structed of separate components that invoke each other. In the next rewrite the build system was made non-recursive.

Do people still use make files?

No. ‘make’ is not obsolete. People are free to use IDEs, but if their IDEs can’t support projects using Makefiles nearly 40 years after make was first written, then they shouldn’t expect people to work around that. The “obsolete talk regarding make” is just a symptom or a pain point, not a proclamation of deprecation.