CMake-Based Build System for Boost: Features

This page describes some of the features of a CMake-based build system for Boost. Some of the features come from CMake itself, some from the Boost-specific CMake macros.

• Configuration and user experience
  • CMake is trivial to install on many platforms
  • Automatically probes for compilers, supported libraries, and tools (e.g., no need to write a user-config.jam)
  • Graphical CMake configuration makes customized builds easy
  • Uses native build tools (e.g., Visual Studio, make, Xcode, Kdevelop) to build Boost

• Portability
  • CMake works on a variety of platforms, many of which are ​tested nightly.
  • CMake input files are platform-independent, high-level build descriptions.

• Deployment
  • Complete support for installing from a build tree.
  • Builds binary installers for Boost for a variety of platforms and formats (Mac OS X packages, Windows installers, RPMs, DEBs, etc.)
  • Build system supports a modular Boost distribution, where libraries are self-contained subdirectories from which users can download and build a subset (in progress).

• Regression testing
  • Complete regression-testing support using CTest
  • Support for submitting regression testing results to a dashboard (​CDash, Dart, Dart2; in progress: ​Bitten)
  • Ability to build and run regression tests against an installed Boost tree.

• Maintainability
  • CMake is open source (BSD license) and written in C++
  • CMake is actively developed and maintained by ​Kitware, Inc.
  • Other, large open-source projects (including KDE, VTK) use CMake for their build system
  • The Boost-specific CMake modules are fully documented, both for Boost developers and with extensive comments within the build system itself
  • The CMake system and language is well-documented ​online and in the ​CMake book