CMake has come a long way since the 2.x dark ages. But even in the newest versions some things can still feel confusing and rather convoluted. Installing is one of them. It’s relatively straight forward for applications meant for end users. However libraries that are supposed to be used as dependencies by other developers from other projects, those are a different story.

This article is about exactly that: installing a library with everything required that other CMake projects can make convenient use of it. Note that this is different from packaging. Creating Windows installers, packages for a Linux …

This article is a bit of an experiment. It describes my thought process while developing a small C++ feature, including failed attempts and all. Of course it’s cleaned up somewhat. The unedited reality would be a bit too messy to make a coherent article.

So … Let’s talk about enums in C++. They are a helpful, easy to use little feature in the language, especially since enum classes added more type safety and scoped names back in C++11. For the rest of the article I’ll use the following enum as an example:

enum class Season : int
{
    spring …

There’s a problem with CMake and code generators that keeps coming up from time to time. I’m talking about the kind of code generators where you know their list of output files only after they are done executing. The generally agreed upon rumour at my place of work and on the web is that integrating such a generator into CMake is a huge pain.

It turns out, the rumour isn’t quite accurate. And here’s why.

LLVM 3.9.1 was just released. It’s time to build the new LLVM/Clang with MinGW.

I managed to build the following things successfully:

• LLVM: the base for everything else
• Clang: C++ and C compilers, libClang, clang-format
• Clang Tools Extra: mostly because it contains clang-tidy
• LLD: the LLVM linker; haven’t played around with it yet, but it builds

These do not build, even after some coercion:

• OpenMP: generally supports Windows, but not MinGW
• libc++: from what I could gather from the docs, does not have Windows support at all

Without libc++ we’re missing a C++ standard …

Building Qt is a bit of a hobby of mine. Not that I have a choice. MinGW 64bit is clearly not a first-class platform for the Qt developers. No official binary exists and most of the time Qt will only build after applying a patch or two. That’s why I built Qt 5.6.2 only now, even though it was released about two months ago.

I always try to build as much of Qt as possible, even though I only really need a relatively small subset. Two components are missing:

• No Qt WebEngine module. It’s built upon …

Windows is a hard environment for a C++ developer to live in – at least if you don’t use Visual Studio. What I find most annoying is setting up and maintaining several compiler toolchains in parallel. Compiler distributions – above all MinGW-w64 – are pretty much one-click installations these days, but easily switching the environment between different toolchains and moving those toolchains between computers ist still a hassle.

Since I’m lazy, I started scripting. Now I have a multi-toolchain ecosystem that can be moved between computers simply by copying a directory tree. Setting up and switching between environments is a single …