Kitware Increases Android Support in CMake 3.7

Support aids cross-compilation process.

Kitware released CMake 3.7 to the software community. Development for the release focused on support for Android. With this support, CMake can generate Android toolchain files to allow developers to easily cross-compile Android applications with their desktop computers.

“What sets CMake apart from other families of tools that build, test and package software is that CMake is cross platform,” said Bill Hoffman, the creator of CMake and the Vice President and Chief Technical Officer at Kitware. “For the 3.7 release, we made CMake more compatible with Android. CMake can now not only transfer data to Android devices, but it can install Android Makefiles to enable integration with existing build systems.”

Over 20 members of the community contributed to the 3.7 release. In addition to support for Android, the release brought an experimental server mode, cmake-server(7), to CMake. This mode makes it simpler for users to combine CMake with integrated development environments such as Qt Creator and Visual Studio. Future work on CMake will further extend the server mode.

Other updates made to CMake for version 3.7 include the following.

• The Ninja generator gained conditional support for Fortran. The generator implements this support when it uses a Ninja tool that contains the features necessary to utilize Fortran.
• The source file signature for the try_compile() command changed to honor configuration-specific flags in test projects.
• The if() command received new Boolean comparison operators.
• CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE picked up the ability to set variables to initialize cache entries the first time a language becomes enabled in a build tree.
• CTest acquired support for test fixtures. Among its capabilities, the CTest component of CMake configures, automatically updates and performs memory checks on software.

For detailed release notes on CMake 3.7, please refer to the Kitware blog. To download the software, please visit the CMake download page.

Projects inside and outside of Kitware leverage CMake, such as the Visualization Toolkit and ParaView. Kitware will demo these open-source solutions for data analysis and visualization at its booth (3437) at The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC16). Kitware team members will also discuss updates to CMake during the conference exhibition, which will take place from November 14 to November 17, 2016, in Salt Lake City, Utah. To set up a time to meet with Kitware, please contact kitware(at)kitware(dot)com.