Separate Compilation Separate Compilation Separate Compilation

GNU Make

• Tutorial 1
• Tutorial 2
• Tutorial 3
• Manual
• Cheat Sheet

Quite OK for (very) small projects. Every C++ programmer should know how to use Make.

• ubiquitous, portable
• a lot of limitations
• not very expressive syntax

CMake

• Tutorial

Seems to be(come) the de-facto standard in the C++ world.

• available on a lot of platforms
• lot of tutorials, resources, etc.
• used as project model by some IDEs
• can be slow at times
• carries a lot of techincal debt
• clumsy syntax

• C++ Starter Project with Complete CMake Setup by Jason Turner
• More Modern CMake Deniz Bahadir (Meeting C++ 2018)
• Effective CMake Daniel Pfeifer (C++Now 2017)
• Using Modern CMake Patterns… Mathieu Ropert (CppCon 2017)

Bazel

• Tutorial

• fast, seems to scale well
• rather rigid project organization
• has many dependencies itself

MSBuild

• Command-line based build system from Microsoft packaged with Microsoft Visual Studio , but also available as stand-alone application.
• XML-based build files
• supported by , Embarcadero C++Builder

build2

• uniform across platforms, no project generation step
• supports wildcard patterns
• support for C++ Modules
• support for cross-compilation
• skips recompilation of ignorable changes (comments, whitespaces, etc).
• dependency management
• no dependencies, only C++ compiler required

QMake

SCons

• automatic dependency analysis
• uses a real programming language (Python) for config files
• pretty verbose; even common tasks require a lot of code
• can be slow for big projects

Premake

Ninja

Meson

FASTbuild

Gradle

Waf

Evoke

GNU autotools

My advice: stay away from autotools if you can.