Re: [boost] Switch to CMake -- Analysis

Subject: Re: [boost] Switch to CMake -- Analysis
From: David Stone (david_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-07-22 20:48:47

There are many build tools you can use to build using CMake on Windows.
Ninja is one choice, but if you choose to generate VS project files, you
still have multiple options. MSBuild supports parallel builds just fine (it
was able to handle our 40 core build machine with no problems at my last
job). You can also invoke the command-line version of Visual Studio's
compiler directly, again, also with parallel builds with no problem. I
found that this was surprisingly faster than using MSBuild, but I was never
able to find out if this is true in general or just an artifact of our
build environment. In other words, there is no "extra dependency" involved
here. There are other tools that the user can choose to use as their
generator if they care (and we do not care which generator they use), but
as long as they meet the minimum requirements of having compiler installed,
you can use cmake --build to build it. Perhaps some of the confusion about
whether this can be done is parallel comes from the fact that by default,
this command will not always invoke a parallel build (it uses whatever
defaults of the generated target is, which for some systems is a single
job). For such build systems as the backend, unfortunately the user has to
invoke the command as `cmake --build -- /maxcpucount` (typing from memory),
unless this has changed in newer versions?