[CMake] OO and/or IDEs

[Brandon Van Every]

On Dec 17, 2007 10:35 PM, Alan W. Irwin <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca> wrote:
>
> BUT autotools were first to market in the Linux world so there are still a
> large number of Linux projects that continue with autotools. However, my
> guess based on obvious technical superiority, the possibility of porting to
> windows (not all Linux projects are like Chicken!), and the huge
> advertisement the KDE adoption gave to CMake is that the current CMake share
> of Linux projects is strongly growing at the expense of autotools.

Plus, if I had a better pattern matching technology and another 6
months of either willpower or funding, I could implement completely
automagical conversion from GNU Autoconf + GMake to CMake.  Including
the nasty awk + grep + egrep + sed tools that Unixen like to use.
Haven't decided if I really want to take it on though.  I need the
better pattern matching technology.

> Brandon, because of this strong growth, I disagree with your emphasis on the
> importance of strategic decisions now for CMake.  Those were done a long
> time ago, and people and projects are strongly voting with their feet
> despite (and this is an extremely important consideration) virtually
> everybody absolutely hating to change build systems.  So long as the CMake
> developers steer a steady course and don't shoot themselves in the foot with
> some stupid decision, their strong growth will continue, and as a result I
> think they we be _the_ major build system in the decades to come.

I'm not that bullish.  I live in a Windows + console game development
universe where plenty of people try out CMake and tell me it sucks.
Not necessarily for well-measured reasons, but initial impressions do
count.  A lot of these people end up rolling their own because
custom-built NIH is endemic to the game industry.  I think it has to
do with game projects not lasting long enough to be reused.  There's a
huge burnout rate for game developers, with entire programming and art
teams getting swapped mid-project.  So nobody knows what's going on,
nobody likes what was done before, and projects tend to be rewritten
from scratch.

I also don't see how you could read all those articles I just posted,
and assume that CMake is going to sweep the table in decades to come.
A far more likely scenario is some Java or C# technology spills over
into the C/C++ universe and becomes a checkbox item.

> Thus, my own feeling is CMake developers and users can quit worrying about
> market share since the future is bright indeed on that score almost
> regardless of what they do.  Instead, they should totally concentrate on
> technical improvements that don't disturb things too much and which make
> CMake build systems simply easier to design and maintain.

I guess you have no fear of a Disruptive Technology biting you in the ass.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology
I prefer to keep my eye on the 8-ball.
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~ssanty/cgi-bin/eightball.cgi


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every