Re: Adding CMakeLists.txt files

From: Edward Diener (eldiener_at_[hidden])
Date: 2021-05-29 20:50:04

On 5/29/2021 2:06 PM, Peter Dimov via Boost wrote:
> Edward Diener wrote:
>> Thanks, Peter, but how do I tell CMake to use a particular compiler ? In
>> b2 I specify the toolset on the b2 command line. In CMake I specify what ?
> 
> There are various ways to control that but the easiest is to set the CC and CXX
> environment variables (on POSIX platforms.)
> 
> Again, when on Windows, things are a bit different. There you need to
> specify the toolset with -T when using the default Visual Studio generator
> (or select a generator with -G.)
> 
> https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.20/manual/cmake.1.html
> 
> CMake's philosophy is very different from b2's.

OK, I will bite <g>.

// Beginning of rant

The difficulty of specifying a compiler to use with CMake, compared with 
the elegance of b2's toolset definitions, makes me really wonder why the 
majority of the C++ world considers CMake anything but software gone 
terribly wrong. I know b2 has some abstruse weaknesses, but specifying a 
toolset/definition is not one of them. Maybe I have missed something but 
I certainly do not see how some CMake generator equates to a particular 
compiler other than the Visual C++ generators, where each generator name 
equates to a particular version of VC++. There must be more I am missing 
but there is not anything in the CMake documentation I can find which 
explains to me how I can specify, for instance, a particular version of 
mingw-w64 gcc or clang on Windows for CMake to use. The explanation for 
the CMake generators at 
https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.20/manual/cmake-generators.7.html#manual:cmake-generators(7) 
is so pathetic that if I did not know the majority of C++ programmers 
swear by CMake I would really have thought that such software 
documentation would have doomed such software for popular use eons ago.

// End of rant