Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tosti 70 days ago
CMake as a language makes PHP look good. Whenever I have to use it, there's a whole lot of warnings and often errors, too. Problem is, the line CMake says had an error may not be the line that caused it. And when everything finally works, in comes a new version that breaks other builds again.

So why does a make need a debugger in the first place? Your build script shouldn't be such a complex program that warrants its own development project.
1 comments
nickelpro 69 days ago
"CMake is too hard to debug, I'm stuck doing confusing print statements everywhere when I misconfigure something"

"Good news, we added a debugger"

"CMake has a debugger? Who would ever want that?"

Sigh.

Working on CMake has taught me a lot about the futility of pleasing everyone.

link
tosti 69 days ago
That's not my point. To make myself clear: CMake is terrible. You can put lipstick on a turd, but it's still a turd. Most languages have a build script written in their own language but C++ projects by and large use CMake.

It's the brittleness. It likes to work on the dev machine and not much else.

link