Really Cool CMake Features

CMake is a mature tool with many features, both big and small. Many go unnoticed or are taken for granted. Help us create a comprehensive list of features that make CMake really cool. Please list your addition under the appropriate package: CMake, CTest, or CPack.

CMake Features

• Color output for make
• Progress output for make
• Incremental linking support with vs 8,9 and manifests
• Supports out-of-tree builds
• 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
  • Graphviz output for visualizing dependency trees
• Full support for library versions
• Full cross platform install system
• Generate project files for major IDEs: Visual Studio, Xcode, Eclipse, KDevelop
  • not tied to make, other portable 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, VERBOSE=1 make PROJECT/fast
• Advanced RPATH handling, full support for all kinds of static/shared libs and plugins, no more cryptic foo.la libtool "libraries"
• support for chrpath, i.e. changing the RPATH without need to actually link again
• Works on many host operating systems (a full list would be good)
• Supports many toolchains: GNU, MS, Borland, Sun, also e.g sdcc
• Beta cross compiling, to Linux, Windows, eCos, supercomputers, no OS, from 8bit uCs to 64bit CPUs
• 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
• Good scripting language that supports:
  • control structures (conditional, iterative)
  • regular expressions, eliminating need for grep+awk+sed+perl
  • macros (similar to functions, with counted or vararg parameters)
  • portable commands for file and directory manipulation
• Extensive auxiliary cmake modules for finding and simplifying use of popular libraries (boost, sdl, fltk, etc.) and utilities (swig, etc).
• Comes with a GUI layer for easy edition of input variables, both Curses and QT based options.
• Command line support
• it's a native tool, windows devs don't have to deal with POSIX shells, OSX devs can continue to use XCode
• .tar.gz archiving available on all platforms: no need to chase down tar/gzip for Windows
• can create OSX library frameworks
• can create OSX application bundles
• scales well for really, really big projects like KDE

CTest Features

• Run all or sub-sets of tests for a project
• Submit testing results to Dart 1,2 and CDash
• Run tests that build and run --build-and-test command
• support coverage with gcc, and bullseye coverage tools
• support memory checking with valgrind, purify, and bounds checker

CPack Features

• Simple Declarative creation of packages/installers using CMake+CPack
• Create Source or Binary packages
• A wealth of supported formats:
  • Create professional windows installers with NSIS
  • Create tar.gz tar.Z on any platform
  • Create self extracting tar.gz .sh files
  • Create rpm
  • Create Debian .deb files
  • Create Cygwin setup packages