[cmake-developers] Future of ccmake and cmake-gui

[Ben Boeckel]

On Wed, Aug 16, 2017 at 09:16:24 -0700, Eric Wing wrote:
> It has native backends for Windows, GTK2, GTK3, Motif, Haiku. Because
> it historically didn't have a Mac OS X backend, most people overlooked
> it. However...I've been implementing a native Mac OS X backend. It's
> not finished, but there is a lot implemented and I'm actually shipping
> a simple app with it this week. Since CMake's GUI usage is also pretty
> simple, I *think* there might already be enough implemented to do the
> CMake-GUI...or it's close enough that I probably could finish those
> needed features.

How easy is it to ship binaries which work on any platform without also
shipping all of the necessary platform backends as well?

> Now IUP only does GUI (which is another reason it stays small), so you
> will need to fill in the JSON and Process requirements. But there are
> tons of JSON libraries. Off the top of my head, cJSON is a really
> fast, tiny, and simple to use JSON library. It's a single C file and
> header, so you can drop it right in the project. (Also MIT). It also
> has a CMake build system if you really want it.

There's already a JSON library in CMake: jsoncpp.

> And a cross-platform create process...those I've seen everywhere and
> I've actually written my own too. I think Apache Runtime is only
> measured in hundreds of kilobytes even with all the stuff you don't
> need.
> A quick Google search turned up this one C++ (MIT)
> https://github.com/eidheim/tiny-process-library

The idea for process creation is to migrate to libuv once all of the
dependencies are supported. Looking at the implementation here it
is…naïve at best. It uses `sh -c` instead of `exec` to do its work which
means that CMake would need to do manual pipe management anyways.

--Ben