Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickelpro | Hacker News Reader

I'm a cmake advocate, but I agree with almost all of these criticisms. They are spot on, if perhaps overhyped (silly syntax is accurate, but not a critical problem).

But cmake has one overwhelming quality that overrides these: it won. Worse is better[1]. A united ecosystem behind a flawed tool is a hundred times better than a fractured ecosystem of utopian tools.

cmake has significantly improved over the last decade and continues to slowly chip away at its most pressing criticisms. Today it is 60% of what I want in a toolchain element. One day it will be 90% of what I want. And when that day comes I will be very happy with its ubiquity.

[1]: https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

View on HN

Given blaze and it's descendants have all the megacorp mind share, in which industry/environments is cmake king?

The C++ industry/environment

The latest Jetbrains survey has cmake usage at 57%, Bazel 3%, and Meson 2% [1]

Cmake isn't competing with Bazel and Meson, Bazel and Meson are interesting and worth talking about, but as a percentage of developer share they're irrelevant. Cmake is competing with legacy, the 33% of developers who still interact Make and VS Projects

[1]: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2022/cpp/

Sure, I also don't know anyone who uses jetbrains at work. I've only programmed in C and C++ for 20 years professionally, and I've never used CMake.

I'm just in a very specific bubble, so I was curious what the others were.

I guess I wouldn't think of cmake as a bubble, it's a part of the ocean the bubbles float in. Blaze/Bazel are a bubble, the only place they see a lot of use are Google-involved projects.

Facebook, MS, Bloomberg, are heavy into CMake. Bloomberg notably so, and MS built vcpkg which is basically a CMake package distribution system. Netflix is mostly a Java/Scala house, and what C/C++ they do have sort of uses a "whatever" approach to build systems (variously, make, cmake, bazel, bash scripts, *gradle*).

"Where is CMake used" is a difficult question. Everywhere.

Yes, I'm trying to state openly that I am in a bubble :P

> Facebook [&c] are heavily into CMake

As an employee, I can tell you this is not accurate re: C++ dev at FB. I'm sure someone somewhere is using it heavily, but largely we use buck, our build system.

I've also never worked at a place that used CMake, but I do see it used a fair amount in OSS.

I'm not allergic to CMake. It seems fine. Ugly and a bit baroque, but it's hardly the only tool like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com