A Cross Platform Development Workflow for C/C++ Applications

Even though the programming languages C and C++ have been standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Standards Organization (ISO) and - in addition to that - the availability of the C library and the standard template library (STL) enormously simplified development of platform independent applications for the most common operating systems, such a project often already fails at the beginning of the toolchain - the build system or the source code project management.In our opinion this gap is filled by the open source project CMake in an excellent way. It allows developers to use their favourite development environment on each operating system, yet spares the time intensive synchronization of platform specific project files, by providing a simple, single source, textual description. With KDE4, CMake was introduced to a very popular project. In this article we propose a workflow to ease the development of cross platform projects and we show, how we used CMake to create an OpenGL application as a demonstrator for a windowed application running on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X as well as a platform independent camera interface as an example for hardware dependent cross platform applications.