CLion and CMake
Hi,
I recently purchased a sub for CLion. I have been using it for the last month or so. It is a very promising product in a lot of ways, but... it turns out that the idea of using CMake as the project file is a no go for me. CMake is a cross platform build tool and CLion seems to be platform unaware. I know that it is possible to kludge it together, but that is not a solution. Oh how I wish y'all would have just used your own project file format and let CMake do what it does best. I use CMake heavily and this IDE gets in the way to the point that it totally eclipses the other nice features.
Thanks,
-G
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Could you please describe the most annoying problems in the current implementation?
Hi,
Sure. The main issue for me is that the IDE is too involved in the CMake build. The idea of being able to provide syntax highlighting, auto complete, error detection, etc. is great, but it should not be involved in the CMake build process itself. A simple mechanism for defining the build command line and directory would be more than sufficient. When it gets to the point that you get different results running the build through the IDE vs. the command line, it has gone too far. CMake builds in professional development environments tend to be large multi-project, multi-platform builds that don't translate well to the approach taken. I guess I am a little confused about who exactly is the target customer. Novice or hobby developers probably wouldn't want anything to do with CMake, and professional environments are all about encapsulation and repeatability. Large builds are automated and done on a particular schedule. Tools that have the potential to impact the build configuration could not be used. While it is true that each developer typically works from a local sandbox, you would probably have to maintain two separate build trees with separate make files. This would be a high price to pay for using a particular IDE. Hopefully this makes sense. Having said all of this, I think the solution would be to have the option to opt out of CMake in favor of a simple start directory / command type approach.
Thanks,
-G