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Comment by kovac | Hacker News Reader

If anyone from Espressif seeing this, I love your MCUs. But can you please improve the ESP-IDF so that it's usable on BSD systems. The Linuxisms baked into its build system is unnecessary.

I think moving from Make in the old version of IDF to CMake was a mistake.

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Love it or hate it, CMake is more or less the de facto build system for C/C++

And just like any build system for everything language/stack, there is a small group of hardcore "enthusiasts" who create and push their true build tech to rule them all and then there is the large majority of people who have to deal with it and just want to build the damn thing.

Hate it, definitely hate it.

I mean, I use it, but I'm not very happy about it.

I didn't mean to sound like a hard-core BSD enthusiast, sorry. I was just very frustrated when they moved to cmake in their newer IDF, they added useless things that excluded BSDs. In its current state, it's untenable to patch it to make it work. This wasn't caused by the use of cmake. They could've moved to cmake, but done so with other OSes in mind, esp since they're already in our neighbourhood.

It should generally be easier to make a CMake buildsystem work well on the BSDs than hand-cobbled Makefiles, in terms of opportunities to introduce Linuxisms.

I wasn't really clear there. The Linux-specific stuff wasn't caused by Cmake. They are two independent things that happened as part of the same upgrade.

Considering that they are supporting Linux, there was no real reason to make it so Linux-specific that all other Unix-like systems got excluded.

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