Supported compilers

The supported compilers are GNU, Intel and Clang. A FATAL_ERROR will be issued if any compiler vendor other than these three is provided. No checks on compiler version are performed, apart from the checks on Intel compiler version in the C++11 support detection (these might one day go in favour of a better approach) Doing checks on compiler versions is not really portable, even using CMake. The best way to do it would be to issue try_compile commands on some test source code and enable/disable compiler flags and/or compiler versions based on the outcome of the tests. This would raise the complexity of the compiler settings significantly and it's thus currently avoided.

The compiler vendor FATAL_ERROR can be bypassed by passing custom flags for C++, C and Fortran (vide infra) There is no guarantee that a successful build will result from this or that a sane executable will be produced.

Compiler flags setup

There are three ways of setting compiler flags for the whole project and the plugins:

1. by specifying the build type --type=[{release,debug,profile}] or -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE={Release,Debug,Profile}. This sets some sensible defaults for the three cases. Only profiling with gprof is currently supported. A profiling build type is just a release build type with the addition of the flags for linking against gprof. The default flags are defined in the files CXXFlags.cmake, CFlags.cmake and FortranFlags.cmake in cmake/compilers
2. by specifying the build type and some extra flags using --extra-cc-flags, --extra-cxx-flags and --extra-fortran-flags (or the corresponding -D CMake option) These flags are appended to the default ones. No checks are performed on the compatibility with the default flags.
3. completely bypass defaults and define your own compiler flags. Use the options --custom-cc-flags, --custom-cxx-flags and --custom-fortran-flags. No checks are performed on the suitability of these flags.

Globally available compiler flags sets

Given a language LANG, the compiler flags sets available globally within the project are:

1. CMAKE_<LANG>_FLAGS the basic flags. These are always set.
2. CMAKE_<LANG>_FLAGS_DEBUG the debug flags;
3. CMAKE_<LANG>_FLAGS_RELEASE the release flags;
4. CMAKE_<LANG>_FLAGS_PROFILE the profiling flags;

Additional flags are appended to the CMAKE_<LANG>_FLAGS if a coverage analysis (using gcov) is to be performed. Additional flags are appended to the CMAKE_<LANG>_FLAGS_DEBUG if sanitizers are used for dynamic analysis. WARNING The use of sanitizers is currently only available with Clang 3.6 Neither the setup script nor CMake perform tests to check that the sanitizers options are relevant for the chosen compiler!