CMake is a cross-platform, open-source software used for build automation, testing, packaging, and installation of software. It is not a build system itself, but rather generates files for native build environments such as Make, Qt Creator, Ninja, Android Studio, Apples Xcode, and Microsoft Visual Studio. CMake has minimal dependencies, requiring only a C++ compiler on its own build system. It is distributed under a permissive BSD-3-Clause license and is widely used, with over 2 million downloads a month.
CMake is designed to handle complicated directory hierarchies and applications that rely on several libraries. It can accommodate projects with multiple toolkits or libraries that have multiple directories. Additionally, CMake can work with projects that require executables to be created before generating code to be compiled for the final application. Its open-source, extensible design allows CMake to be adapted as necessary for specific projects.
The purpose of CMake is to provide a high-level description of a project, its file relations, and dependencies, making it easier to manage projects at scale compared to writing makefiles or other compile scripts by hand. It is a cross-platform build-tool-agnostic project config generator, allowing developers to define the structure of their project and generate an equivalent project config for various build environments, such as plain makefiles, Visual Studio, Xcode, and more. CMake is also a build automation tool that generates scripts for other build automation tools, striving to be platform independent across operating systems and intermediate build tools involved.
In summary, CMake is a powerful and widely used tool for managing the software build process, providing developers with control over software compilation, support for multiple builds from a single source tree, and the ability to handle complex directory hierarchies and applications dependent on several libraries.
