You can do this manually every time you want to build your project, but it would be tedious and painful. In case you didn’t know, you can’t use the same compiler to build all the different kinds of sources. CMake recognizes which compilers to use for a given kind of source. You can also use “Make” to control installing or uninstalling a package, generate tags tables for it, or anything else you want to do often enough to make it worth while writing down how to do it.ĬMake stands for Cross-platform Make. “Make” is not limited to just building a package either. These shell commands can run a compiler to produce an object file, the linker to produce an executable, ar to update a library, Makeinfo to format documentation, etc. For each non-source file in the program, the makefile specifies the shell commands to compute it. Pretty neat! “Make” is not limited to any particular language. It updates only those non-source files that depend directly or indirectly on the source files that you changed. Hence, if you change a few source files and then run “Make”, it doesn’t recompile the whole thing. Recompiling the entire program every time we change a small part of the system would be inefficient. It also automatically determines the proper order for updating the files, in case one non-source file depends on another non-source file. “Make” figures out automatically which files it needs to update, based on which source files have changed. ![]() The details of the build process are actually recorded in the makefile that you supply. Every project comes with its own rules and nuances, and it can get quite painful every time you have a new collaborator. The reason we need “Make” is because it enables the end user to build and install your package without knowing the details of how it’s done. Simple stuff! If you didn’t understand it, go back and read the paragraph again because it’s important for the next part. When you write a program, you should write a makefile for it, so that it is possible to use “Make” to build and install the program. This makefile lists each of the non-source files and how to compute it from other files. It gets its knowledge of how to build your program from a file called the “makefile”. The “Make” tool needs to know how to build your program. “Make” is a tool that controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program’s source files. ![]() These executable files are the ones that carry out the actual task. The way in which we design a software system is that we first write code, then the compiler compiles it and creates executable files. Before getting into the differences, let’s first see what they are. It is important to understand the differences between them to make sure you don’t get yourself in trouble. What is this whole build process and why is it structured this way? What are the differences between CMake and Make? Does it matter? Are they interchangeable?Īs it turns out, they are quite different. A lot of people just follow the instructions blindly, not really caring about why we need to do things in a certain way. You are supposed to run “cmake” and “make” commands on the terminal. You must have seen those “CMakeLists.txt” files floating around. ![]() When you join a big company or start working on a project with a large codebase, there are all these builds that you need to take care of. Programmers have been using CMake and Make for a long time now.
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