When comparing CMake vs Tup, the Slant community recommends CMake for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source build systems for C/C++?” CMake is ranked 2nd while Tup is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose CMake is:
This way everyone can use their favorite IDE in order to develop CMake, Code Blocks, qtcreator, Visual Studio, (and more).
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Compatible with different IDE's
This way everyone can use their favorite IDE in order to develop CMake, Code Blocks, qtcreator, Visual Studio, (and more).
Pro Built-in, cross-platform dependency finding
Pro Out-of-the-box GUI available
CMake comes with the fantastic ncurses GUI ccmake
out of the box. Large codebases including WeeChat use it, to the point that the developer never needs to touch CMake code, but it is highly readable if he wishes to examine it.
Pro Speed
It is very fast.
Pro Tidy
It will automatically clean-up old files.
Pro General
Not bound to C/C++.
Pro Lua
Tup supports writing build definitions using Lua or Tupfiles.
Pro Cross platform
Supports Linux, OSX, and Windows.
Cons
Con Uses own language
Con Variants not working on Windows
The solution for having different build configuration (think Release/Debug) is broken on Windows.
Con Cannot incrementally modify or delete files
Cannot incrementally modify files (e.g. LaTeX PDF, VISing and LIGHTing Quake maps, which takes the same BSP file as input and output), and will not delete files (e.g. rm build/*.o).