Switching between GCC and Clang/LLVM using CMake

CMake honors the environment variables CC and CXX upon detecting the C and C++ compiler to use:

$ export CC=/usr/bin/clang
$ export CXX=/usr/bin/clang++
$ cmake ..
-- The C compiler identification is Clang
-- The CXX compiler identification is Clang

The compiler specific flags can be overridden by putting them into a make override file and pointing the CMAKE_USER_MAKE_RULES_OVERRIDE variable to it. Create a file ~/ClangOverrides.txt with the following contents:

SET (CMAKE_C_FLAGS_INIT                "-Wall -std=c99")
SET (CMAKE_C_FLAGS_DEBUG_INIT          "-g")
SET (CMAKE_C_FLAGS_MINSIZEREL_INIT     "-Os -DNDEBUG")
SET (CMAKE_C_FLAGS_RELEASE_INIT        "-O3 -DNDEBUG")
SET (CMAKE_C_FLAGS_RELWITHDEBINFO_INIT "-O2 -g")

SET (CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_INIT                "-Wall")
SET (CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_DEBUG_INIT          "-g")
SET (CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_MINSIZEREL_INIT     "-Os -DNDEBUG")
SET (CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_RELEASE_INIT        "-O3 -DNDEBUG")
SET (CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_RELWITHDEBINFO_INIT "-O2 -g")

The suffix _INIT will make CMake initialize the corresponding *_FLAGS variable with the given value. Then invoke cmake in the following way:

$ cmake -DCMAKE_USER_MAKE_RULES_OVERRIDE=~/ClangOverrides.txt ..

Finally to force the use of the LLVM binutils, set the internal variable _CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX. This variable is honored by the CMakeFindBinUtils module:

$ cmake -D_CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX=llvm- ..

Putting this all together you can write a shell wrapper which sets up the environment variables CC and CXX and then invokes cmake with the mentioned variable overrides.

Also see this CMake FAQ on make override files.

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System wide C++ change on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install clang
sudo update-alternatives --config c++

Will print something like this:

  Selection    Path              Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0            /usr/bin/g++       20        auto mode
  1            /usr/bin/clang++   10        manual mode
  2            /usr/bin/g++       20        manual mode

Then just select clang++.

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You can use the toolchain file mechanism of cmake for this purpose, see e.g. here. You write a toolchain file for each compiler containing the corresponding definitions. At config time, you run e.g

 cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=/path/to/clang-toolchain.cmake ..

and all the compiler information will be set during the project() call from the toolchain file. Though in the documentation is mentionend only in the context of cross-compiling, it works as well for different compilers on the same system.

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You can use the option command:

option(USE_CLANG "build application with clang" OFF) # OFF is the default

and then wrap the clang-compiler settings in if()s:

if(USE_CLANG)
    SET (...)
    ....
endif(USE_CLANG)

This way it is displayed as an cmake option in the gui-configuration tools.

To make it systemwide you can of course use an environment variable as the default value or stay with Ferruccio's answer.

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System wide C change on Ubuntu:

sudo update-alternatives --config cc

System wide C++ change on Ubuntu:

sudo update-alternatives --config c++

For each of the above, press Selection number (1) and Enter to select Clang:

  Selection    Path            Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0            /usr/bin/gcc     20        auto mode
  1            /usr/bin/clang   10        manual mode
  2            /usr/bin/gcc     20        manual mode
Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number:

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If the default compiler chosen by cmake is gcc and you have installed clang, you can use the easy way to compile your project with clang:

$ mkdir build && cd build
$ CXX=clang++ CC=clang cmake ..
$ make -j2

or specify the compiler for cmake:

$ cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang ..

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You definitely don't need to use the various different llvm-ar etc programs:

SET (CMAKE_AR "/usr/bin/llvm-ar") SET (CMAKE_LINKER "/usr/bin/llvm-ld") SET (CMAKE_NM "/usr/bin/llvm-nm") SET (CMAKE_OBJDUMP "/usr/bin/llvm-objdump") SET (CMAKE_RANLIB "/usr/bin/llvm-ranlib")

These are made to work on the llvm internal format and as such aren't useful to the build of your application.

As a note -O4 will invoke LTO on your program which you may not want (it will increase compile time greatly) and clang defaults to c99 mode so that flag isn't necessarily needed either.

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According to the help of cmake:

-C <initial-cache>
     Pre-load a script to populate the cache.

     When cmake is first run in an empty build tree, it creates a CMakeCache.txt file and populates it with customizable settings for the project.  This option may be used to specify a  file  from
     which to load cache entries before the first pass through the project's cmake listfiles.  The loaded entries take priority over the project's default values.  The given file should be a CMake
     script containing SET commands that use the CACHE option, not a cache-format file.

You make be able to create files like gcc_compiler.txt and clang_compiler.txt to includes all relative configuration in CMake syntax.

Clang Example (clang_compiler.txt):

 set(CMAKE_C_COMPILER "/usr/bin/clang" CACHE string "clang compiler" FORCE)

Then run it as

GCC:

cmake -C gcc_compiler.txt XXXXXXXX

Clang:

cmake -C clang_compiler.txt XXXXXXXX

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You can use the syntax: $ENV{environment-variable} in your CMakeLists.txt to access environment variables. You could create scripts which initialize a set of environment variables appropriately and just have references to those variables in your CMakeLists.txt files.

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Simply add this at the end of your ~/.bashrc

export CC=/usr/bin/clang
export CXX=/usr/bin/clang++

Relaunch the terminal and from now on, cmake would use clang to build every projects. Edit the ~/.bashrc to switch back to gcc.

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It is best not to specify a compiler in CMakelists.txt.

Just add the following command

-D CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER="xx" -D CMAKE_C_COMPILER="xx"

Example:

cmake -D CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER="/bin/clang++-xx" -D CMAKE_C_COMPILER="/bin/clang-xx"

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