Building bdwgc with CMake

UNIX and Win32 binaries (both 32- and 64-bit) can be built using CMake. CMake is an open-source tool like automake - it generates makefiles.

CMake (as of v3.14.5) is able to generate:

Build process

The steps are:

Install cmake (e.g. from cmake.org);
Add directory containing cmake executable to PATH environment variable;
Run cmake from the bdwgc root directory, passing the target with -G option - e.g. type cmake -G "Visual Studio 9 2008" and use the gc.sln file generated by cmake to build gc library.

Notes:

Specify -D enable_cplusplus=ON option to build gccpp and gctba libraries (i.e. the ones that provide bdwgc C++ support);
Specify -D BUILD_TESTING=OFF option to skip compilation of the tests.

You can also run cmake from a build directory to build outside of the root of the source tree - just specify the path to the latter, e.g.:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "Visual Studio 9 2008" ..
cmake --build . --config Release
ctest --build-config Release -V

Here is a sample for Linux (build, test and install, w/o C++ support):

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .
ctest
make install

The main input to cmake is CMakeLists.txt file (script) in the bdwgc root directory. For help, go to cmake.org.

Another project could add bdwgc (of the required version) as one of its dependencies with something like this in their CMakeLists.txt file:

find_package(BDWgc <version> REQUIRED)
add_executable(Foo foo.c)
target_link_libraries(Foo BDWgc::gc)

Other exported libraries are: cord, gccpp, gctba.