what is CMake actually?
CMake is an open source build system published under a BSD-style license. CMake is developed by a commercial company: Kitware Inc. Kitware specializes in open source 3D visualization, medical imaging, and quality engineering tools. Besides CMake, Kitware supports and actively develops VTK, the Visualization ToolKit, ITK, the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit and ParaView; all of these are also cross platform (Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac OS X) and Open Source software. CMake’s development was supported by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Lab, and National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NAMIC). But like the chain of autotools, CMake itself doesn’t do the actual building itself. The actual building is still done by the “make” utility or the respective native build tool on each platform. CMake reads script files, named CMakeLists.txt; the output it produces serves as input (“Makefiles” or e.g. project files fo
