The Future of Toucan – Part 3

Moving to CMake

Before releasing a version of Toucan on Linux the build system needed cleaning up. Rather than create projects on Windows and writing makefiles on Linux I decided to use a proper build system.

After looking at a few alternatives I chose to use CMake, which is used by many other open source projects such as KDE and Blender. Because of this it has a large community surrounding it and adding support for some of the more unusual libraries that Toucan uses, such as cxxtest and SWIG was easy. The entire build system description is approximately 150 lines of nice readable code. With a suitable build system set up the next setup was compiling under Linux.

Cross Platform Support

Support for Linux is planned to be added in time for the Toucan 3 final release, currently it is an area of active work, it compiles full on GCC4 with no errors or warnings. However because I have not finished sorting out Lua support nothing yet runs. However it will all be fixed up, hopefully in time for the second development test. Linux is not the end of my cross platform ambitions however. Mac is almost impossible due to the cost needed to acquire one, however OpenSolaris and *BSD are being investigated, if there are any other operating systems that you would like to see Toucan running on then please post below! Then next part will focus on the Toucan help system.