OpenGATE | News: Building a new GATE

Development of the GATE framework started in a simple Visual Studio Solution. To ensure portability, a switch to CMake was made. But now also CMake requires additional parameters to produce the required results.

When we are only targeting Windows or Linux, CMake is easy. It just collects .c and .cpp files and feeds them to the compiler.

But:

With a great vision comes great responsibility.

Following different CMake build configurations are currently in use:

• MSBUILD Windows 32 bit (Unicode)
• MSBUILD Windows 32 bit (ANSI)
• MSBUILD Windows 32 bit (with WinXP toolchain)
• MSBUILD Windows 64 bit (Unicode)
• MSBUILD Windows ARM 32
• MSBUILD Windows ARM 64
• MSBUILD EFI x64 ABI
• NMAKE Windows 32 bit
• MinGW Windows 32 bit cross compile on Linux
• Codeblocks MinGW
• Codeblocks Unix Makefiles
• MAKE (default system compiler)
  • Adaptions for Linux
  • Adaptions for NetBSD
  • Adaptions for OpenBSD
  • Adaptions for FreeBSD
• GCC x64 EFI ABI
• GCC ARMv7 Linux ABI cross compile on Linux X86/X64
• Watcom WMAKE DOS
• Watcom WMAKE NT

Most of these configurations are prepared by simple shell scripts in the /scripts folder, that start the compilation process without any other arguments.

A lot of magic is done in the CMakeLists.txt files, where compiler versions and features are evaluated at runtime, as some older or also newer compilers need additional command line switches to make everything compilable with the best possible code generation.

Finally, binaries are written into /build/TOOLCHAINNAME/deploy/bin.

One major goal is now to standardize all different build variants and to run their scripts automated on a build server.

Notice: Some platforms are not CMake-ready at the moment:

• Android
• Universal Windows Platform

Both are still Visual Studio Solutions that control the proper build steps. Hopefully they will be managed by CMake too in the near future.