GNU vs MSbuild

[Chefkoch]

Hello *,

I´m searching an overview about the differences between the two building methods with advantages and disadvantages.

[support]

Hi,

GNU Make was the original build system supported by VisualGDB from the beginning, while MSBuild support was added relatively recently. Hence many of our tutorials mention GNU Make, although we actually recommend MSBuild for all new projects.

The main advantages of GNU Make are:

• You can build Make-based projects on Linux without VisualGDB (e.g. on a continuous integration server)
• If you are familiar with GNU Make internals, you can easily hack Makefiles to add complex custom steps

If none of these are relevant to you, MSBuild will be much better because:

• It builds faster due to heavy optimization on our side
• It allows configuring build settings in a much more flexible way.
• IntelliSense immediately picks up changes to build settings, so you don’t need to synchronize them manually.

There’s actually a post in our developer blog that gives an overview of the main advantages of MSBuild over the other build systems.

[Author]

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