Why We Love and Hate CMake

Are you tired of wrestling with CMake files, endless boilerplate, and confusing build systems? You're not alone! In this insightful interview, we sit down with Nicole Patricia Mazzuca, build system and package management expert at Remarkable (and former Microsoft vcpkg contributor), to dive deep into the world of C++ build tooling. Nicole shares practical advice, lessons learned from maintaining massive codebases, and her vision for empowering all C++ developers to own their build systems without fear. Whether you’re an experienced build engineer or new to C++, this conversation will help you rethink how you approach project builds.

Key topics covered:

• Why CMake is both loved and hated by developers
• Real-world pain points with CMake, Make, AutoTools, and MSBuild
• How vcpkg helps streamline developer dependencies across platforms
• Introducing Rho — a new CMake library designed to make build files simpler, more maintainable, and less intimidating for non-experts
• The philosophy behind improving C++ build ergonomics, inspired by modern tools like Rust
• Open source, community-driven approaches to evolving CMake and build tooling

Link:

* https://github.com/remarkable/rho-oss

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome

01:05 Do you love or hate CMake?

02:54 Nicole's background

03:33 What is vcpkg

06:06 What is rho?

08:57 How is rho solving the problem that you can still solve hard problems, while it is easy to solve easy problems?

12:13 How much simplification can we hope for?

13:45 Q: What is the license of rho? A: It is about starting a conversation?

15:16 Are there more benefits from using rho, than just reduction of lines of codes?

16:49 How does vcpkg fit into all of this?

About the guest:
Nicole Patricia Mazzuca has worked on the problems of build systems and dependency management since she did her first internship on the vcpkg team at Microsoft in 2019. She continued her work on vcpkg, bringing registries and manifests to the tool (with help from the rest of the team). After a short stint on the Microsoft standard library team, she moved to Norway and has started work again on build systems and dependency management for reMarkable.