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Comment by Arnavion | Hacker News Reader

>It's unfortunate that CMake is the least bad build system we have. You should probably still use CMake for multi-platform code. You shouldn't expect people to learn some obscure rival build-system just to work on your code.

What little C I write I compile with Makefiles, but I've seen many new C projects on Github using meson. It look better than cmake at a glance, and at this point in time isn't obscure either.

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CMake is a meta programming language designed to compile into Makefiles.

It can compile into visual studio projects or xcode projects. That's how it achieves multiplatform support.

Basically by writing it in CMake rather then make you've automatically written your make file as well as many other platform configurations. Of course the caveat like the OP is that CMake syntax and design decisions are just plain bad.

I think you replied to the wrong comment.

I don’t think so. The parent was saying that Make isn’t a replacement for CMake because it isn’t multi platform.

They replied to a comment mentioning meson as a replacement for cmake by explaining how cmake works.

Thanks for the pointer to meson. Ten minutes into it and it's already far less broken than other build systems I've been test driving recently. I'm sure it will let me down soon, but so far ... :-)

(My reaction to CMake's scripting language was unprintable).

Meson is quite good. It's biggest issue is it is not Turing complete so it has certain limits of extensibility.

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