I come from a Windows background. I've been having a need to do more C programs lately, and I have generally been trying to migrate more towards platform-agnostic configurations. I had started looking at CMake under the promise of a cross-platform build system, but now I see a lot of non-specific complaints about it. Is there something specific you can articulate that is wrong with CMake, and what alternative is there for someone who A) wants to build cross-platform, but B) with as native of tools as possible for those platforms?
In other words, I'd rather not build with GCC on Windows.
So, my issue with CMake is that I usually run into it with annoying academic projects, or other weird shit--that doesn't matter, but what does matter is that the code quality tends to correlate pretty well with my personal rage.
When I try to run it on Linux, sometimes it'll just fail because reasons (looking at you, player-stage five years ago). When I try to run it on Windows, I have to fiddle with settings, rerun it a few times, and only grudgingly will it emit a project and directory for me.
And what it does emit? Almost never a properly organized project. Usually a project with a name like "Project1" and some rando layout. Usually I can't even figure out what #defines are being set, because it's hidden away.
I'd much rather people just write simple Makefiles (it can be done!), and a few VS project files, and be done with it. CMake has never once, in the last five years, ever resulted in me looking up from my machine going "Man, that was such a good experience, I'm sure glad we have CMake!".
The JS ecosystem, as crackheaded as it is, is still not 1000th of 1% of the annoyance as dealing with C/C++ using CMake.
And to be fair, there are a couple of folks I trust who have had great success with it--and yet, I never seem to run into those projects when I need them.
Cool VR stuff by the way...hit me up if you'd like to BS about it sometime.