CMake replacing Autotools?

[Christoph Grüninger]

Hi Magnus,

for sure, I am going to do CMake cheerleading.

I think OpenJDK would profit from a change to CMake:

1. Less tools required for building: CMake + gmake/Ninja/msbuild/Xcode
instead of Autotools and all the related Linux/Unix tools, that are
somewhat alien to Windows and OS X. Visual Studio even provides its own
CMake.

2. More choices to actually build the project: Use integrated build
tools of IDEs (Visual Studio, Xcode) or use Ninja, which is faster than
gmake

3. Today, from what I hear, more people are familiar with CMake compared
to Autotools. This argument can be applied to how familiar user are
building OpenJDK and to how familiar potential contributors are. And I
know, you developers know your code base :-)

4. CMake is better supported by IDEs like Visual Studio, Qt Creator,
KDevelop.

5. A lot of code bases were ported to CMake like KDE, Qt, or LLVM. Their
arguments apply here, too. Also their trade-offs between investment and
benefit.

> At various times, I have dreamed of replacing the configure script with
> something that is more modern and easy to maintain than this bash/m4
> mix. We have a very well-defined API for the configure script: the user
> calls "bash configure" in the root directory of the project, with a set
> of --options, and as a result we create a spec.gmk file that defines the
> configuration. This could easily be replicated in another system. But if
> I were to rewrite this from scratch, I'd rather write the whole
> configure logic in Java (apart from some thin shell script logic needed
> to find the boot jdk), rather than trying to shoehorn in our build model
> in CMake.

I understand your temptation, but writing and maintaining all the
configure/find logic and quirks will be a burden. I'd try to reduce the
build system code to a minimum and rely on a third-party solution to do
as much as possible for me.

Bye
Christoph

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