Investigate converting / supplementing the configure/build process with CMake

[charliegracie]

The current auto tools build / configure process being used by OMR works but there are a lot of known issues and complexities. One of the major confusions for new users to the OMR project is how to actually configure, build and test the project. The OMR project is quite large and supports thousands (if not more) of different build configurations.

I have spent some time with other contributors to OMR looking into these issues. These issues could all be improved by making changes to the current auto tools story but it would be a reasonably large amount of work.

I believe that there are some real benefits to be had by using CMake instead of auto tools for the OMR development process. The biggest improvement would be the different back-ends for CMake. CMake has support to generate visual studio solution files which would easily allow the project to add windows testing via AppVeyor. Also the IDE integration is provides would be helpful for developers.

I think that it would be great to see a CMake prototype that could configure and build the OMR project. I would like to see both auto tools and CMake processes running side by side in our automated builds (probably not the OSX builds as adding another SPEC would likely bring our builds down). We could easily keep both build infrastructures around until we decide that the CMake solution is the direction that we want to go in.

I would like to open up this discussion for everyone to provide their feedback so that we can come up with a great solution for the project. To keep momentum with this idea I would like to propose that we decide if we want to move forward with a CMake prototype by April 29th. I assume the discussion about implementation, etc. will keep going well beyond that date but I would like to get started on the prototype as early as possible

[knn-k]

Hi, I am trying to cross-build triltest for aarch64, and making some changes in CMake settings in #3000.
Now I can build triltest executable for aarch64 in my local environment.