CMake

CMake is a free, cross-platform, software development tool for building applications via compiler-independent instructions. It also can automate testing, packaging and installation. It runs on a variety of platforms and supports many programming languages.

As a meta-build tool, CMake configures native build tools which in turn build the codebase. CMake generates configuration files for other build tools based on CMake-specific configuration files. The other tools are responsible for more directly building; using the generated files. A single set of CMake-specific configuration files can be used to build a codebase using the native build tools of multiple platforms.

Notable native build tools supported by CMake include: Make, Qt Creator, Ninja, Android Studio, Xcode, and Visual Studio.

CMake is distributed as free and open-source software under a permissive BSD-3-Clause license.