[e12e]

FWIW when I tried out qmake for a toy c++ project, it's the first make tool for c++ that actually just worked[1] for a simple command-line app. CMake works too, but not without fighting the horrible syntax of CMake first. And make... well it works, but at what price to your soul? ;-)

[1] The documentation is actually a little dense, as qmake is a tool capable of building "real projects", but I found that a simple qmake -project && qmake && make (I think, at least you need a project file, and the let qmake make a makefile, and then use that...).

http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qmake-running.html

See also: https://web.njit.edu/all_topics/Prog_Lang_Docs/html/qt/qmake...

[arunc]

At last, I find someone who uses qmake on HN. I've been using qmake for 4 years now. At first I started experimenting with it for a small project. The learning curve was quick and eventually fell in the comfort zone it created.

Now I use it for large scale C++ projects and I've never looked back for other build tools, not even CMake.

Surprisingly, I never understood why KDE project that uses the complete Qt ecosystem doesn't use qmake but rather settled to CMake.

[realharo]

Does qmake deal with finding the dependencies and automatically adding the include paths, libraries, etc. for them?

As far as I know, you need to stick the compiler and linker flags manually into qmake, which basically means that it works on your machine, but may break on anyone else's system. This is what a lot of the complexity inside cmake is addressing - differences in build environments.

[e12e]

I think the answer is: "It depends.". From some searching, it looks like cmake has better cross-platform support, and is (unsurprisingly) more powerful when you need to do something a little gnarly. That said, it appears (never had need to test) that qmake works fine with pkg-config:

http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qmake-project-files.html

In my experience (mostly from compiling from upstream source, when something isn't available in Debian and/or backporting for personal use) there are different kind of libraries, some behave better than others (eg: easy to install under $HOME/opt with xstow -- as I prefer to /usr/local, as the latter needs root and/or rw-privileges on /usr/local). I've yet to find any pattern for when things just work, and when things don't (the real reason typically being some hard-coded paths or other nastiness -- I just mean some obscure projects work fine, some big ones fail miserably). So I guess YMMV -- but for now, qmake is the tool for building simple c++ I've found that is simple, for simple projects. I also use CMake (preferably with ninja) -- but I don't really like the CMake "language". Maybe what we need is a CMake-generator? Then we can generate CMake-files that generate ninja files that build our code! ;-)

[weland]

I've had good results with qmake, too, but I don't know how well it works for large projects. I don't think any of the codebases I've used it on was > 100,000 LoC.

[pubby]

premake is another tool that just works for C++, but it's not as flexible as some of the other build systems and so I don't use it.