Migrating a Visual Studio C++ Project to Linux and CMake

Question

I'm currently trying to move from Windows 10 to Linux (Pop,_OS). but I'm having trouble getting my C++ Project to compile and run correctly on the latter, My C++ project was created using Visual Studio, where I also specified the include folders, library folders, what should be linked. etc in the solution properties. I now want to switch to writing my code using Neovim and not Visual Studio (or Visual Studio Code) and have tried compiling it via G++, I quickly noticed that my include files weren't recognized. so I tried to use CMake and created a CMakeLists.txt. I tried using both

INCLUDE_DIRECTORIES()

and

TARGET_INCLUDE_DIRECTORIES()

but no matter what path I enter, my included files were not recognized. Even when I used a path to the specific include file that caused the first error, it still wasn't recognized.

My goal would be that I can specify an include folder and a library folder, so that I can just add files and folders in these and that the new files and folders automatically get recognized when compiling (ie I would not have to edit the CMakeLists.txt in the future). Is that even possible with CMake and if yes, does anyone know where i can find further information about that or does anyone have a CMakeLists.txt file that does this? If no, would I have to specify each and every file and folder in the CMakeLists.txt file and do the same for every new include and library?

Project structure:

Overall folder
\- build
\- include
---> includeFolder1
---> includeFolder2
---> ...
\- libs
---> library1.lib
---> library2.lib
---> ...
\- src
--> main.cpp
--> other .cpp's and .h's
--> other folders with .cpp's and .h's

I've tried compiling with G++ and CMake, but both did not work, no matter what I specified as the include and library paths.

Answer 1

I have found the problem that caused my errors. The problem wasn't with CMake, it was with Windows and Linux specific details. I always received errors like "<foo\foo.h> no such file or directory", which led me to think that CMake couldn't find the include directory or the files in it. The problem, however, is with the include path itself. On Windows, paths can be given with a backslash ('\') but on Linux, paths are denominated with a forward slash ('/'). So in my example, the path to the file was "../foo/foo.h" but my code had "#include <foo\foo.h>". So when migrating a project from Windows to Linux, be sure to watch out for backslashes in your #include statements!

Below is a template CMakeLists.txt, that should be a good starting point if you want to migrate your Visual Studio project to Linux. I've used glfw (+ glad) as an example library:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.20)

project(ExampleProject)

add_executable(${PROJECT_NAME} src/glad.c src/main.cpp)

target_include_directories(${PROJECT_NAME} PRIVATE include)

target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} GL dl glfw)