[CMake] CMake IDE integration survey (was RE: Visual Studio + Ninja?)

[Marian Luparu]

Lead PM for the VC++ team at Microsoft here. I just wanted to echo Nagy-Egri’s message.

We are very interested in learning more about your current edit-build-debug experience for C++ apps or libs using CMake. Whether you’re developing on Windows or not, using VS or not today, we do want to hear from you on how the IDE integration for CMake projects can be improved.

We are currently running a survey<http://www.instant.ly/s/EwZKW> (short!) for that purpose. If you have a few minutes to complete it, Thank You!, your feedback is important to us.


From: CMake [mailto:cmake-bounces at cmake.org] On Behalf Of Nagy-Egri Máté Ferenc via CMake
Sent: Monday, March 7, 2016 1:19 AM
To: Robert Dailey <rcdailey.lists at gmail.com>; CMake <cmake at cmake.org>
Subject: Re: [CMake] Visual Studio + Ninja?

Short version: no.

Long version: Visual Studio is heavily built around MSBuild as the back-end of execution of various tasks. While theoretically it could be done that MSBuild only acts as a relay and calls into Ninja scripts, you would lose the entire feature set of Solution Explorer, which is quite a large portion of the IDE. (Using CMake does preclude using most of it though.) MS is looking into<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2fblogs.msdn.microsoft.com%2fvcblog%2f2016%2f02%2f29%2fdeveloping-c-cross-platform-projects-with-cmake%2f&data=01%7c01%7cmluparu%40microsoft.com%7cbc6855fe46f6419b386f08d346698025%7c72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7c1&sdata=5PC2TbMSW6uuT5vtYHsA6HvyScsDhpTa11HZZ8rNMZo%3d> deeper CMake integration into their IDE, but the exec back-end will most likely be MSBuild.

Should you really want to achieve this, you would need support from both CMake side and VS side. You would need to develop an Add-In with a custom project type (CMake+Ninja) and hook up most Solution Explorer entries to generate not MSBuild but Ninja script portions. And from CMake you would need a generator for this mixed generator type. It could be done, but it’s a lot of effort. Given the performance of MSBuild (which is not that bad compared to Ninja), the benefits would only be substantial in enourmous projects. MS generally looks into increasing build throughput by integrating IncrediBuild<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2fblogs.msdn.microsoft.com%2fvcblog%2f2015%2f12%2f11%2fdid-you-see-improve-your-build-times-with-incredibuild-and-visual-studio-2015%2f&data=01%7c01%7cmluparu%40microsoft.com%7cbc6855fe46f6419b386f08d346698025%7c72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7c1&sdata=UKiu%2fm6xC%2fZk1WukPz4FSpVoBAheClyMjhoMvvcBTLc%3d> into their IDE.



Feladó: Robert Dailey<mailto:rcdailey.lists at gmail.com>
Elküldve: 2016. március 2., szerda 21:45
Címzett: CMake<mailto:cmake at cmake.org>
Tárgy: [CMake] Visual Studio + Ninja?

Right now I am using a toolchain file to setup cmake to build my C++
code against Android NDK. I also have several custom targets for
running 'ant' commands for the java portions.

I can use the Ninja generator to generate the build scripts to make my
builds work fine. However, I'd love to be able to use Visual Studio on
Windows as my IDE. However, there is no "Visual Studio - Ninja"
generator that I can see. Is there a way to make Visual Studio wrap
the Ninja scripts and simply execute them? that way I can use it to
edit code and invoke builds.

Thanks in advance.
--

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