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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T22:23:05+00:00

I am starting to write a moderately sized project in C++ requiring a fairly

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I am starting to write a moderately sized project in C++ requiring a fairly large amount of files and dependencies on other projects.

Do you think manually maintaining a Makefile for this project is the best approach?

Are there other better alternatives for C++ that make build management and dependency management of files really easy to handle?

Also, what IDE is good for C++ development on Linux? I am comfortable with Vim, but do you think there are good IDEs for C++ (like Eclipse for Java) that provide code-completion etc?

Thanks!
Ajay

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  1. Editorial Team

    Others have already recommended using CMake. To my mind you should manage your project with CMake then decide on your favourite IDE.

    CMake allows you to describe the project to be built, instead of how to build it. For example: I want to create a shared library called foo with source files a.cpp, b.cpp and c.h and it requires these link dependencies. Then on unix you get libfoo.so and on windows you get foo.dll and foo.lib. All common project settings can be abstracted up to higher levels in the build tree, this keeps most files very simple. More complicated requirments can be refactored into macros.

    Once your project is described like this CMake will generate makefiles and/or IDE projects. This means each developer can choose their own IDE, as well as allowing you to mandate an IDE if appropriate.

    My company use CMake to build the c++ in our product on windows and solaris. It contains 600 projects and 1.5 million lines of source code. We originally chose it as a cross platform build utility when porting to solaris, however for a large project like ours it is much easier to manage the build with CMake than with Visual Studio project files. I would recommend it as a build utility for any c++ project of any size

    We use the eclipse cdt on solaris and are very happy with it. Most of our development is with visual studio on windows. cmake also works well with other ides I use it with KDeveloper4 on linux at home without a hitch.

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