Really Cool CMake Features

Here is a feature list of CMake that is in no particular order. There are a lot of small and big things that CMake can do. CMake comes with three main packages CMake, CTest, and CPack.

Major (and minor features for CMake)

• Color output for make
• Progress output for make
• Incremental linking support with vs 8,9 and manifests
• Auto-rerun of cmake if any cmake input files change (works with vs 8, 9 using ide macros)
• Auto depend information for C++, C, and Fortran
• Full support for library versions
• Full cross platform install system.
• Generate project files for major IDE's Visual Studio, Xcode, Eclipse KDevelop
  • not tied to make, other generators like ant possible
• Ability to add custom rules and targets
• Compute link depend information, and chaining of dependent libraries
• Works with parallel make and is fast, can build very large projects like KDE on build farms
• make help. make foo.s, make foo.E
• Advanced RPATH handling, full support for all kinds of static/shared

libs and plugins, no more cryptic foo.la libtool "libraries"

• Works on many host operating systems (a full list would be good)
• Supports many toolchains: GNU, MS, Borland, Sun, also e.g sdcc
• Full dependencies: build a target in some directory, and everything

this target depends on will be up to date

• Extensive test suite and nightly builds/test on many platforms
• modular design (e.g. the Find modules, language, toolchain and OS

support files) * > easily extendable

• just one tool instead of automake+autoconf+libtool+m4+shell+make
• it's a native tool, windows devs don't have to deal with POSIX

shells, OSX devs can continue to use XCode

• can create OSX library frameworks
• Beta cross compiling, to Linux, Windows, eCos, supercomputers, no OS, from

8bit uCs to 64bit CPUs

• support for chrpath, i.e. changing the RPATH without need to actually

link again

• CTest

• CPack
  • packaging with cpack, supports also rpm and deb (need feedback)