[cmake-developers] Access output from CheckCXXSourceRuns and CheckCSourceRuns

[Harry Mallon]

Inline responses.


Harry Mallon
CODEX | Software Engineer
60 Poland Street | London | England | W1F 7NT
E harry at codexdigital.com | T +44 203 7000 989
> On 19 Jan 2016, at 15:42, Brad King <brad.king at kitware.com> wrote:
>
> On 01/18/2016 01:32 PM, Harry Mallon wrote:
>> https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/pull/209
>> This passes through the output of the run (as well as the return value)
>> so that users can access any output without using try_run.
>
> Thanks.  The signature of the macro takes a variable for the return value
> to be stored.  We need something similar to control the name of the variable
> used to store the output.  This could either be done with an optional/named
> argument or simply by documenting that the output will come in `<var>_OUTPUT`.

Sounds sensible

> We also need to define what happens when the check has already been run.
> The normal `<var>` result is cached to prevent repeat runs of the check.
> I don't think we can reasonably cache the entire output of the run and
> provide it on later re-runs of CMake when the check does not actually run.

I agree, we shouldn't be caching all of that

> OTOH your use case for extracting versions may have other solutions.
> We generally try to avoid try_run because it only works when the toolchain
> targets the host architecture and so does not work when cross compiling
> in general.  Look at what Modules/CMakeDetermineCompilerId.cmake does to
> extract the compiler id and version information.  It also leaves files
> in build trees under CMakeFiles/${CMAKE_VERSION}/CompilerIdC that you
> can see.  Basically it encodes the needed information in strings that
> can be extracted from the binaries without running them.

I have read CMakeDetermineCompilerId.cmake but I can't see how I can use that kind of an approach. Having static const char* set by the preprocessor is a good idea for the reasons that you mention but I cannot retrieve a version number without linking and interrogating the library. I could be missing something though.

H