Using cmake on windows for c++

Question

for around 5 consecutive days i have been trying to set up my computer with the c++ environment for programming with libraries such as sdl,glm,opengl. its important for us to be able to run it on unix machines on presentations so im running with cmake. i finally got it to work with the cmake-gui, i wont even bother trying anymore with any IDE.

i specified my folder project and where to build the binaries, i got a folder "CMakeFiles" along with a txt "CMakeCache", a CMAKE file "cmake_install.cmake" and a file "Makefile". also in my folder "CMakeFiles" there are lots of other folders such as "CMakeTmp", "CompilerIdC", "CompilerIdCXX etc" and in both folders "Compiler*" has each an .exe which doesnt work! so where is my wanted executable?

i opened cmd and navigated to my folder and tried to write "make" as we are supposed to do according to the intruction. alas, it didnt work very well. hoping you could share your wisdom and help a newbie like me!

so what exactly is needed for compiling projects containing additional libraries? so far i have a compiler, Mingw32, the latest CMake and using the cmake-gui for extracting the binaries but gets makefiles.

EDIT: hrrm. is it only me who gets these kind of problems? i can add that i have look thorough about 10 tutorials and 90% of the steps are similar (if compiling with VS which i tried at first):

• Download latest SDL
• Make a folder on e.g C:\SDL with two folders, include and lib
• Copy the libs and includes from the downloaded SDL
• Make new VS project, open VC++ directories and add lib/incl folder on e.g C:\SDL
• Add to linker SDL.lib and SDLmain.lib (i made sure they got linked, no problem here)
• Change system to WINDOWS (optional if you dont want two windows)
• Added include to "additional libraries"
• Put the SDL.dll file (which i got from the latest SDL) in my C:\windows\system32(64SysWoW) and also in my project file.

so what i am actually looking for is gettning the CMake to work, since it generates and builds sources successfully (with the gui) and i feel im closing in. do i need to add any additional libraries from sdl to my compiler mingw32 and/or cmake?

Answer 1

if you run cmake by command:

cmake -G "Visual Studio 14 Win64" path\to\source\dir

you need to run this command to continue(in Visual Studio Command Prompt):

msbuild Project.sln

either if you run cmake:

cmake -G "NMake Makefiles" path\to\source\dir

you need to run this cmd to continue(in Visual Studio Command Prompt):

nmake

Answer 2

You were almost there with Visual Studio. Select Visual Studio as target. Open the generated project in Visual Studio, build it. (just like you alread did). Then, instead of trying to run BUILD_ALL, run a real project that creates an executable, it should also be in that list. Just right click it and 'play' it.

If you still get errors, post them in detail including what you did before the error. Note: a carefully configured cross platform CMake project (aka the CMakeLists.txt) should not require any fiddling with VC++ directories. It should work automagically, especially with well known libs such as SDL.